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[Discuss-gnuradio] UC professor says SW radio a bad idea


From: Steve Schear
Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] UC professor says SW radio a bad idea
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 23:35:04 -0800

Party's over for low-voltage CMOS, academics say
By Stephan Ohr, EE Times
Feb 4, 2002 (9:15 AM)

URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020204S0027

SAN FRANCISCO - Even before the curtain rises Monday (Feb. 4) on the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), experts here were mulling the consequences of scaling CMOS for low-voltage circuitry - and the news was not good.

[much deleted...]

Other speakers in the evening session, concentrating on the effects of low-voltage on digital circuits, offered conciliatory messages about the consequences. Bob Brodersen, the University of California professor who leads the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, pointed out that dedicated function architectures using large amounts of parallelism offered the highest efficiency - in terms of millions of operations per second (Mops) per milliwatt - per unit area of silicon. His thesis was based on an examination of the processors presented at ISSCC over the past 20 years. The software-intensive general-purpose processors with high clock rates faired the worst in terms of Mops accomplished per milliwatt, he said. DSPs with parallel math operations show a more efficient use of current and voltage, or more Mops per mW. But the most efficient semiconductor devices - those demonstrating four orders of magnitude efficiency improvement - were dedicated processors for MPEG-2 and 802.11 decoding. Such reasoning rules against a general-purpose processor - and software-intensive operations - for portable systems. "The software radio is a really bad idea," Brodersen concluded.





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