Wireless Wednesday at DAC

A complete wireless system is a very complex design problem. It requires designers from very different backgrounds. The communication engineer needs to figure out the wireless system performance, and will run lots of simulations in Matlab or Simulink to get the bit error rate (BER) that he or she needs. The team will also need a MAC designer who is willing to dig into the standards and implement the MAC protocols with minimum resources and within the latency and throughput requirements. The hardware or digital designer will develop the building blocks to implement the next generation LDPC coder or Turbo accelerator. The analog and RF designers are probably in a different department worrying about getting the power amplifiers, LNAs, D/As and A/Ds operating at 1V and with a minimal power budget. Then there is the poor system designer that needs to figure out how all the modules communicate, can be integrated and tested.