PROTON - Software Defined Radio platform for automotive telematics applications

Overview

The number of different wireless standards is growing rapidly. Bringing current and future broadcast and communication into the vehicle allows car manufacturers to create new customer experience by providing entertainment and information.

Developing an separate electronic control unit (ECU) for each wireless standard takes a long time, which heavily delays the introduction of new systems and services.

By moving the signal processing from specialized SoCs to programmable hardware and processors, this system enables the integration new wireless standards through a firmware upgrade.

Research Focus

Early Design Space Exploration for SDR

For system architects, it is important to estimate the required processing power of the application scenario to determine a suitable architecture and select a suitable set of chip hardware.

We investigate ways to improve accuracy for early design estimations by considering estimation inaccuracies for both software and hardware accelerators based on tasks modeled as synchronous dataflow graphs.
 

Architectures for SDR

The required processing power for SDRs can come from FPGAs or DSPs. While DSPs have specialized set of instructions or vector operations that are suitable for a demodulation or channel correction, FPGAs offer a higher degree of freedom, for example to implement special channel decoders in hardware.

Dynamic Reconfiguration of FPGAs allows to expand the available resources on the FPGA by swapping hardware accelerators during system runtime. This increases logic utilization for otherwise idle hardware.
 

PROTON Project Website

More details on the PROTON/PLATA project and the contribution of partners can be found on http://www.proton-plata.fr/