The invention provides a
baseband system for a short-range radio communication
system. The
baseband system complies with the
Bluetooth baseband specification and is well suited for efficient hardware implementation, providing low power, small size and low cost radio
subsystem design. The baseband system includes a
transceiver unit and a buffer unit so that the system has an efficient
gate count and reduced
power consumption. The
transceiver unit design is based on pipelined
signal processing with distributed
datapath flow control. The
transceiver unit processes outgoing and incoming packets and comprises several
signal processing units connected in series so that each
signal processing unit is clocked by a common
clock signal. A mode line is connected to each
signal processing unit for switching each
signal processing unit between transmit mode and receive mode. Control lines connected to each
signal processing unit convey flow control information to one or more preceding signal processing units in transmit mode, or to one or more subsequent signal processing units in receive mode. The buffer unit comprises a buffer system applying a flexible
memory management concept that results in an efficient implementation of buffers or storage elements in terms of
gate count and
power consumption and provides the ability to dynamically allocate memory for
variable length user packets flexibility. The buffer system holding the data of the first processing unit and the second processing unit comprises several storage elements such that each storage element has a first storage unit and a second storage unit. A switching subsystem is provided for switching the individual storage elements between the first and second
modes. In the first mode, each first storage unit is addressable by a first processing unit and each second storage unit is addressable by a second processing unit. In the second mode, each second storage unit is addressable by the first processing unit, and each first storage unit is addressable by the second processing unit.