A system design for IEEE802.11ad

IEEE 802.11ad working group has specified the PHY and MAC technology over 60GHz. The PHY modem consists of 4 modulation technologies such as DSSS, single carrier, OFDM and low power single carrier. The physical layer data rate is provided from 27.5 Mbps to 6.4 Gbps. This paper suggests a system level architecture to make a hardware evaluation board for the IEEE 802.11ad PHY. We have summarized the physical specification of the IEEE 802.11ad briefly and found the important requirement to implement the single carrier modes using the FPGA boards. Then, we have proposed the appropriate hardware architecture, external connection method that contains the bit-width of interface and clock. We could have shown a 3-board solution for the system including MAC and ADC/DAC and RF. Especially, we have compared 2 methods connecting the ADC/DAC. The one is using normal port of the FPGA and the other is using the high speed port of the FPGA. Finally, we have provided the system architecture that could supply the data rate of 2.31Gbps.