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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.
RE: [Discuss-gnuradio] Canadian open source SDR proposal, Bicer, Murat, 2002/02/04