A novel wide-band direct conversion software radio platform

This paper describes the architecture and the operation of a PC-based software radio transceiver. The development environment is a real-time PC-based platform that allows testing to be done in a simple manner using the main software functionality of a PC. The front-end of the transceiver implemented in hardware represents a wideband design that functionally converts wireless signals directly into a gigasample digital data stream in the receiver (and vice versa in the transmitter). This direct conversion approach shows the greatest promise in realizing the "holy grail" of software radio.