A programmable platform for software-defined radio

Integrated circuits for communication systems are usually designed with the primary goal of minimizing silicon area and power consumption. Usually, this yields a solution where each functional block in the algorithm is mapped directly into a dedicated hardware block. The hardware blocks provide limited flexibility by setting of parameters but only as far as it has been specified during the design phase. According to the abovementioned reasons we believe that more flexibility is necessary that requires fully programmable solutions based on digital signal processors (DSP). For the development of an SDR platform architecture our primary design goal is to find the most flexible and easy-to-program solution within a specified power budget for the baseband processing.