Tunable Wordlength Architecture for a Low Power Wireless OFDM Demodulator
Shin Yoshizawa, Yoshikazu Miyanaga · IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics Communications and Computer Sciences · 2006
We present a low power architecture that dynamically controls wordlengths in a wireless OFDM demodulator. Finding the optimum wordlength for digital circuit systems is difficult because the trade-off between the hardware cost and system performance is not conclusive. Actual circuit systems have large wordlengths at the circuit design level to avoid calculation errors caused by a lack of dynamic range. This indicates that power dissipation can still be reduced under better conditions. We propose a tunable wordlength architecture that dynamically changes its own wordlength according to the communication environment. The proposed OFDM demodulator measures error vector magnitudes (EVMs) from de-modulated signals and tunes the wordlength to satisfy the required quality of communication by monitoring the EVM performance. The demodulator can reduce dissipated energy by a maximum of 32 and 24% in AWGN and multipath fading channels.