Faust : on - Chip Distributed Soc Architecture for a 4 G Baseband Modem Chipset

The 10 X increase in complexity for the future 4G telecommunication terminals is a major challenge for system designers. SoC solutions seem the only answer to cope with the performance requirements, but the usual design practices lead to huge difficulties, especially for the implementation of the control schemes. We describe our SoC implementation of a baseband subsystem for a high performance 4G terminal. Our architecture, called FAUST, is based on distributed synchronization and asynchronous communication. We highlight how we have actually implemented these two key principles in our design. We detail their impact in terms of complexity and the new constraints it introduces to the synchronization schemes. Finally, we illustrate the new control scheme with the timing diagram of an actual reception sequence.