ASIP for 5G and Beyond:Opportunities and Vision

The tutorial discusses application-specific instruction-set processors (ASIP) and their potential for the fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G networks. ASIP is a class of customized processor, typically designed for a single or a small set of applications, incorporating flexibility of a software implementation and efficiency of a register transfer level (RTL) based design. In this brief, we present advantages, methodology, tool sets and a summary of state-of-the-art ASIPs for communication systems. In addition, we identify key features of 5G and beyond 5G systems where flexibility is a key requirement and thus, ASIPs can play a pivotal role