Implementing a Software Defined Radio using the Maestro 49-tile processor

The Maestro 49-tile Radiation-Hard-by-Design chip was developed to demonstrate the application of space-qualified, multicore hardware. We have investigated the implementation of a single precision floating-point pipeline FFT to be used as part of a Software Defined Radio (SDR) application. The details of the software architecture that can adapt to the use of different numbers of tiles and the performance of the N-point FFTs for N = 128, 512, 1024, and 2048 are described. The maximum throughput achieved for a 2048-point FFT is 27 million samples per second when 20 of the 49 available tiles are used for separate FFT blocks, one tile is used for input data distribution, and one tile is used for output data collection. We also report on the performance of the SDR based upon the FFT experiments.