As we move forward towards the next generation of wireless pro-tocols, the push for a better radio physical layer is ever increasing. Conventional radio architectures are limited to narrow operating regions and fails to adapt with changing technology. This is fur-ther strengthened with the advent of cognitive radio, which needs a more versatile and flexible framework that is programmable within the timing constraints of a protocol. In this paper we present an architecture for Software Defined Cognitive Radio that caters to the specific baseband processing requirements in a changing environ-ment. We aim to provide more flexibility by de-constructing the radio pipeline into a framework of user controlled kernels that can be reconfigured at run-time. This architecture provides the bare-bones of a OFDM based radio physical layer that can adapt to per-form a varied number of tasks in different radio networks. We also present a novel message based real-time reconfiguration method to transmit and receive a wide range of waveforms used in concurrent wireless protocols.

Portable electronic devices will be limited to available energy of existing battery chemistries for the foreseeable future. However, system-on-chips (SoCs) used in these devices are under a demand to offer more functionality and increased battery life. A difficult problem in SoC design is providing energy-efficient communication between its components while maintaining the required performance. This dissertation intro-duces a novel energy-efficient network-on-chip (NoC) communication architecture. A NoC is used within complex SoCs due it its superior performance, energy usage, mod-ularity, and scalability over traditional bus and point-to-point methods of connecting SoC components. This is the first academic research that combines asynchronous NoC circuits, a focus on energy-efficient design, and a software framework to customize a NoC for a particular SoC. Its key contribution is demonstrating that a simple, asynchronous NoC concept is a good match for low-power devices, and is a fruitful area for additional investigation. The proposed NoC is energy-efficient in several ways: simple switch

As we move forward towards the next generation of wireless pro tocols, the push for a better radio physical layer is ever increasing. Conventional radio architectures are limited to narrow operating regions and fails to adapt with changing technology. This is fur ther strengthened with the advent of cognitive radio, which needs a more versatile and flexible framework that is programmable within the timing constraints of a protocol. In this paper we present an architecture for Software Defined Cognitive Radio that caters to the specific baseband processing requirements in a changing environ ment. We aim to provide more flexibility by de-constructing the radio pipeline into a framework of user controlled kernels that can be reconfigured at run-time. This architecture provides the bare bones of a OFDM based radio physical layer that can adapt to per form a varied number of tasks in different radio networks. We also present a novel message based real-time reconfiguration method to transmit and receive a wide range of waveforms used in concurrent wireless protocols.