SYSTEM-ON-CHIP ARCHITECTURES FOR SIGNAL PROCESSING AND COMMUNICAnONS Niu, Sufeng System-On-Chip (SOC) is one of the most popular Computer Aided Design (CAD) methodologies in electronic system design. In this research, SOC design is investigated in two different types of applications: i) low cost and power efficient applications; and ii) high performance computing applications. To explore low cost and power efficient design, a microcontroller based wireless medical system is investigated. Two wireless communication protocols for medical applications and patient monitoring are analyzed. In addition, the ZigBee stack developed by TI and a medical amplifier are discussed. For high performance SOC applications, implementations of several matrix operations are examined. An improved fixed-point hardware design of QR decomposition is introduced and optimized for Xilinx FPGAs. A Givens Rotation algorithm is implemented using a folded systolic array and the CORDIC algorithm. This approach is highly suitable for high-speed FPGAs or ASIC designs. It is found that the Xilinx XC5VLX110T FPGA is capable of running the QR decomposition at 246MHz. M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 2012 Saniie, Jafar 2012-04-30 2012-05 Thesis application/pdf islandora:8100 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/2809 ECE / Electrical and Computer Engineering Illinois Institute of Technology en In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access