Digital baseband system

Abstract

The invention provides a baseband system for a short-range radio communication system. The baseband system complies with the Bluetooth baseband specification and is well suited for efficient hardware implementation, providing low power, small size and low cost radio subsystem design. The baseband system includes a transceiver unit and a buffer unit so that the system has an efficient gate count and reduced power consumption. The transceiver unit design is based on pipelined signal processing with distributed datapath flow control. The transceiver unit processes outgoing and incoming packets and comprises several signal processing units connected in series so that each signal processing unit is clocked by a common clock signal. A mode line is connected to each signal processing unit for switching each signal processing unit between transmit mode and receive mode. Control lines connected to each signal processing unit convey flow control information to one or more preceding signal processing units in transmit mode, or to one or more subsequent signal processing units in receive mode. The buffer unit comprises a buffer system applying a flexible memory management concept that results in an efficient implementation of buffers or storage elements in terms of gate count and power consumption and provides the ability to dynamically allocate memory for variable length user packets flexibility. The buffer system holding the data of the first processing unit and the second processing unit comprises several storage elements such that each storage element has a first storage unit and a second storage unit. A switching subsystem is provided for switching the individual storage elements between the first and second modes. In the first mode, each first storage unit is addressable by a first processing unit and each second storage unit is addressable by a second processing unit. In the second mode, each second storage unit is addressable by the first processing unit, and each first storage unit is addressable by the second processing unit.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to communication systems for processing outgoing and incoming data. More specifically, the invention relates to baseband units that process packets including headers and payloads. Background technique [0002] While the invention is applicable to a variety of communication systems, the invention will be described focusing on one embodiment of a short-range radio communication system that complies with the Bluetooth baseband specification, which can be found in "Specification of the Bluetooth System "Version 1.0B, Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), found in December 1, 1999. [0003] The desire to easily connect various computing and communication devices without the need to buy, carry or connect cables has been fulfilled by several companies. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) and the IEEE Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) standardization group 802.15 are working to enable wireless ad- Specification for...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0008] Drawbacks of known buffer implementations are memory inefficiency for variable length packets, and lack of addressability and allocation flexibility

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