Digital Hardware Choices For Software Radio (SDR) Baseband Implementation

A software defined radios (SDR) is highly configurable hardware and software platforms that enable the implementation of the rapidly expanding 3G and 4G digital wireless communication infrastructures. Many sophisticated signal processing tasks are performed in a SDR, for example: channel estimation, equalisation, forward error correction, adaptive antennas, rake receiving, modulation, advanced compression algorithms, and vocoding. There are many silicon solutions for implementing the various functions of SDR, mainly: field programmable gate array (FPGA), digital signal processor (DSP), general purpose processor (GPP) and application specific IC (ASIC). This paper presents an overview of the main aspects of these enabling devices and systems. Also, we shed light on the design methods and tools available to link the algorithmic and implementation domains to help to achieve design optimisation and shorten the prototyping time. Finally, we suggest a generalized SDR scheme, FPGA+DSP based, and that is suitable for several mobile air interfaces