FALCON, A Software Defined Radio Transceiver Concept

In this communication, the authors present a software defined radio (SDR) transceiver design, termed FALCON. The FALCON is entirely based on a modular signal processing concept. In particular, the receiver deploys modules which process and generate log-likelihood ratio (LLR) signals, hence, providing the capability of a plug-and-play-type reconfigurability. To the best knowledge of the authors, such a reconfigurability approach has not yet been pursued as consequently before. The authors present their reconfigurability approach in this communication. The FALCON currently deploys commercial radio frequency (RF) front-ends provided by Atmel, analog and interface boards developed and implemented by the authors and DSP starter kits (DSK) with TI TMS320C6416 DSPs, provided by Texas Instruments. The hardware/software integration has been done in the laboratory of the authors as well as the development of all the signal processing modules, which have been realized in C language tailored for the TMS320C6416 DSPs (digital signal processors). The authors describe the FALCON and present measurement results. For an easy comparison of these results with widely published simulation results the authors consider UMTS/W-CDMA. It is shown that the FALCON provides superb performance