Frame-based modeling for automatic synthesis of FPGA-Software Defined Radio

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is now becoming a ubiquitous concept to describe and implement Physical Layers (PHYs) of wireless systems. Moreover, even though the FPGA is expected to play a key role in SDR, describing a PHY at the Register-Transfer-Level (RTL) requires tremendous efforts. This paper introduces a novel methodology to rapidly implement PHYs for SDR. The work relies upon High-Level Synthesis tools and dataflow modeling in order to infer an efficient RTL control unit for the application. The proposed software-based over-layer partly handles the complexity of programming an FPGA and integrates reconfigurable features. It consists essentially of a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) combined to a DSL-Compiler. An IEEE 802.11a transceiver has been explored via this approach in order to show the flexibility features.