Communications Signal Processing Using RISC-V Vector Extension.

Flexible and scalable solutions will be needed for future communications processing systems. RISC-V processors enhanced with vector processing capabilities as specified by the soon-to-be ratified RISC-V vector extension (RVV) pose an interesting base for such systems. Vector processors provide an efficient means of exploiting data-level parallelism, which is heavily present in communications kernels. Furthermore, RVV code is by its design agnostic from the underlying hardware platform which enables scalability. On the exemplary basis of a generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) implementation on a RVV processor, we investigate its baseband processing capabilities and guide through RVV's key features and peculiarities. Our vectorization achieves a speedup of up to 60 times compared to the scalar base case and a throughput of 784 symbols per second. The utilization of 77 % is slightly below more specialized solutions. Nevertheless, this work serves as a baseline for further investigations on flexible and scalable RISC-V vector communications processors.