ASIP design on behalf of hybrid beamforming in MIMO communication system

In this thesis, an Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP) is developed to calculate optimum analog beamforming coefficients for a hybrid beamformer in a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) communication system. MIMO technology offers promising solutions to meet the increasing data-rate requirements. A lot of research is being carried out to improve the feasibility of these systems. Hybrid beamforming systems aim at reducing the feasibility issues faced by MIMO. Hybrid beamforming essentially involves beamforming in the analog as well as the digital domain. The ASIP proposed in this assignment is aimed at calculating optimum coefficient values for the analog beamformer. This thesis presents the different design decisions taken while developing the ASIP, the detailed design flow undertaken in the processor modeling tool and the implementation of the target application on a reference design. Additionally, comparison results against a floating point processor have also been discussed to show the performance (and energy) efficiency of the designed ASIP.