Highly Flexible and Scalable Millimeter Wave Software Defined Radio

This paper presents the project and implementation of a Software Defined Radio (SDR) development platform capable of operating in the Millimeter Wave (mmWave) frequency range. The SDR is composed by a base card, operating from tens of MHz up to 6 GHz, and an expansion daughter board, which performs the frequency conversion to and from mmWave bands. The base card comprises numerous programmable blocks and features, making it highly flexible by itself. The SDR can transmit and receive signals with a bandwidth of up to 56 MHz, and offloads data via Peripheral Component Interconnect - Express (PCIe) to an on-board Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) or, via a standardized edge connector, to any PCIe host. The platform can be powered from various sources, including Universal Serial Bus - Power Delivery (USB PD), and the power budget is overprovisioned, allowing additional expansion cards to be designed and attached to the SDR, further increasing its capabilities. This paper not only focuses on the architecture of the SDR, but also presents experimental assessment results of the most important performance characteristics.