Designing soft radios for high data rate systems and integrated global services

Integrated services can be obtained either with a single device capable of delivering various services or with a radio that can communicate with devices providing complementary services. Such radios can be implemented efficiently through the use of soft radio architectures that use custom computing machines (CCM) to enable hardware paging. CCM try to retain the desirable characteristics of FPGA for a particular application or a suite of applications and can be configured in real-time. In this paper, we show how the layered radio architecture using a CCM called Stallion, can handle 3G and future high data rate systems that require complex high speed signal processing while retaining flexibility. A W-CDMA downlink RAKE receiver with channel estimation is implemented to demonstrate an efficient soft radio design using simple and cost effective CCM.