A pipelined implementation of OFDM transmission on reconfigurable platforms

The principles of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation have been around since 1960s. However, recently, the attention toward OFDM has grown dramatically in the field of wireless and wired communication systems. This is reflected by the adoption of this technique in applications such as digital audio/video broadcast (DAB/DVB), wireless LAN (802.11a and HiperLAN2), broadband wireless (802.16) and xDSL. In parallel, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are also emerging as a fundamental paradigm in the implementation of these standards. This is due to their increased capabilities (speed and resources). Moreover, the FPGApsilas programmability make them a preferable choice for evolving standards in comparison with ASIC fixed designs. In this work, a pure VHDL design, integrated with some intellectual property (IP) blocks, is employed to implement an OFDM transmitter according to the IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard. The proposed design has been mapped and tested on Xilinx Virtex-II Pro (XC2VP30-7ff896) FPGA, and approximately 25% of the total available fabric was occupied.