The Achilles heel of software defined radio (SDR) platforms is their power consumption and complexity. By construction, a platform designed for general purpose processing cannot compete with a custom crafted ASIC from the power and area perspectives. In this talk, we will present recent research results on both system and circuit architecture levels to manage the complexity of SDR broadband wireless platforms. The goal is to expand the concept of cognition to address jointly, both environment and self cognition (resource management) with the target of minimum complexity for a given set of conditions. The discussion will be framed in the context of a state of the art software defined system targeted for a public safety response network that is required to support diverse configurations (including MIMO configurations of WiMax, CDMA etc.) while operating under harsh wireless channel conditions. We will abstract this use scenario into a set of requirements and propose design techniques to manage complexity and improve performance. From the power consumption perspective, we present a unique approach for power management which factors in the built-in algorithmic resilience to errors inherent in all wireless designs. This error tolerance can be utilized and co-designed with the hardware circuitry in mind to provide resilience not only to channel induced errors but also to hardware induced faults thus expanding the adaptation space to unexplored domains. A case study of power management for a 3G compliant WCDMA modem and an H.264 video decoder will be discussed showing the potential power savings that can be achieved by utilizing the fault adaptive power management techniques presented.

Host: Ashu Sabharwal

Biography of Ahmed M. Eltawil:
Ahmed M. Eltawil is an Assistant Professor and Henry Samueli Faculty Fellow of Engineering at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept. at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he is the director of the Wireless Systems and Circuits Laboratory (WSCL). Professor Eltawil received his doctorate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. He received his B.Sc and M.S. with Honors from the Electronics and Communications Department, Cairo University, Egypt in 1997 and 1999 respectively. His current research interests are in digital circuit and signal processing architectures for communication systems with a focus on physical layer design where he has published four book chapters and more than fifty technical papers on the subject with one receiving a best paper award. Since 2006, he has been a member of the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) and has been actively involved in expert policy panel discussions towards the applications of cognitive and software defined technology for critical first responder communication networks. Dr. Eltawil has held several industry positions including being the director of ASIC Engineering at Innovics Wireless (2000-2003), where he led the team to deliver the first reported diversity enabled third generation W-CDMA mobile transceiver system on a chip. From 2003-2005, he was a partner at Silvus Communications, where his work focused on designing a scalable Multi-Input-Multi-Output platform for OFDM and OFDMA applications.