Application of VHDL to software radio technology

The recent growth of wireless and PCS services has resulted in a number of competing and incompatible air interface standards. The military has also experienced problems with incompatible radio formats during joint operations. In order to provide seamless interoperability between communications networks, the concept of the "software radio" has been promoted. The ideal software radio digitizes the radio spectrum at the receive antenna and performs all demodulation and signal processing functions via software downloaded to general purpose digital signal processors (DSPs). However, the current state of the art in general purpose DSPs is inadequate to support this ideal software radio concept. The use of dedicated signal processing ASICs along with reprogrammable FPGAs make a highly reconfigurable software radio practical. VHDL can be utilized as the "programming language" in the development and implementation the high speed digital signal processing algorithms within the FPGAs.