The paper, “SODA: A High-Performance DSP Architecture for Software-Defined Radio,” was authored by U-M graduate students Yuan Lin, Hyunseok Lee, and Mark Woh, Yoav Harel from Intel, U-M faculty Scott Mahlke and Bredt Family Professor of Engineering Trevor Mudge, Arizona State U. faculty Chaitali Chakrabarti, and U-M alumnus Krisztián Flautner, now at ARM Ltd.

This year’s issue included eleven papers from the past year’s most significant research publications in computer architecture based on both novelty and the potential for short or long term impact on industry.

Signal-Processing On-Demand Architecture (SODA) is a fully programmable architecture that was developed to accommodate the requirements of software-defined radio (SDR), which the authors describe as belonging to an emerging class of applications that combine the processing requirements of a supercomputer with the power requirements of a mobile terminal. The paper describes how two widely differing wireless protocols, W-CDMA and 802.11a, are able to meet power-performance requirements by separating control and data processing and by employing ultrawide SIMD execution.