FPGAs Are Ideal For Building High-performance, Reconfigurable Signal Processing Systems Datasheet

Reinventing the Signal Processor

FPGAs are ideal for building high-performance, reconfigurable signal processing systems such as software defined radios.

The ultimate goal in software radio has been the realization of an agile radio that can transmit and receive at any carrier frequency using any protocol, all of which can be reprogrammed virtually instantaneously. The Software Defined Radio Forum (SDRF) (www.sdrforum.org), an organization dedicated to supporting the development, deployment, and use of open architectures for advanced wireless systems, defines a software defined radio (originally coined by Joe Mitola in 1991 [1]) as radios that provide software control of a variety of modulation techniques. These include wide-band or narrow-band operation, communications security functions (such as hopping), and waveform requirements over a broad frequency range.

Figure 1 shows the architecture of a generic software radio. Smart antenna array technology is used for both the receive and transmit paths in the system. On the receive side, multiple high-bandwidth digitized antenna data is channelized, converted to baseband, and filtered - typically the sample rate is adjusted at this node. Other sections of the radio’s physical layer (PHY) perform demodulation, synchronization, multiuser detection, adaptive interference cancellation, source decoding, forward error correction, beam forming, and adaptive equalization.

All of these computations present significant challenges for the radio PHY signal processing engine. Furthermore, much of the processing occurs at very high data rates. Demands for Configurability and Agility One of the driving objectives underlying SDR concepts is the desire to have a single hardware platform capable of servicing a number of radio environments. This type of reconfigurability could be used in several ways. For example, manufacturers developing infrastructure equipment or network operators building out a network could deploy a software radio system in Europe configured to support Universal Mobile.

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