TeraPool-SDR: An 1.89TOPS 1024 RV-Cores 4MiB Shared-L1 Cluster for Next-Generation Open-Source Software-Defined Radios

Radio Access Networks (RAN) workloads are rapidly scaling up in data processing intensity and throughput as the 5G (and beyond) standards grow in number of antennas and sub-carriers. Offering flexible Processing Elements (PEs), efficient memory access, and a productive parallel programming model, many-core clusters are a well-matched architecture for next-generation software-defined RANs, but staggering performance requirements demand a high number of PEs coupled with extreme Power, Performance and Area (PPA) efficiency. We present the architecture, design, and full physical implementation of Terapool-SDR, a cluster for Software Defined Radio (SDR) with 1024 latency-tolerant, compact RV32 PEs, sharing a global view of a 4 MiB, 4096-banked, L1 memory. We report various feasible configurations of TeraPool-SDR featuring an ultra-high bandwidth PE-to-L1-memory interconnect, clocked at 730 MHz, 880 MHz, and 924 MHz (TT/0.80 V/25 °C) in 12 nm FinFET technology. The TeraPool-SDR cluster achieves high energy efficiency on all SDR key kernels for 5G RANs: Fast Fourier Transform (93 GOPS/W), Matrix-Multiplication (125 GOPS/W), Channel Estimation (96 GOPS/W), and Linear System Inversion (61 GOPS/W). For all the kernels, it consumes less than 10 W, in compliance with industry standards.