  The Large Intelligent Surface (LIS) concept has emerged recently as a new
paradigm for wireless communication, remote sensing and positioning. It
consists of a continuous radiating surface placed relatively close to the
users, which is able to communicate with users by independent transmission and
reception (replacing base stations). Despite of its potential, there are a lot
of challenges from an implementation point of view, with the interconnection
data-rate and computational complexity being the most relevant. Distributed
processing techniques and hierarchical architectures are expected to play a
vital role addressing this while ensuring scalability. In this paper we perform
algorithm-architecture codesign and analyze the hardware requirements and
architecture trade-offs for a discrete LIS to perform uplink detection. By
doing this, we expect to give concrete case studies and guidelines for
efficient implementation of LIS systems.
