Design Space Exploration in an FPGA-Based Software Defined Radio

The FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) technology is expected to play a key role in the development of Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms. To this aim, leveraging the nascent High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools, a design flow from high-level specifications to Register-Transfer Level (RTL) description can be thought. Based on such a flow, this paper describes the Design Space Exploration (DSE) that can be achieved using loop optimizations. The mainstream objective is to demonstrate the compile-time flexibility of an architecture when associated with a reconfigurable platform. Throughout both IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11g waveform examples, we show how the FPGA resources can be tuned according to a targeted throughput.