Extreme Software Defined Radio – GHz in Real Time

Software defined radio is a widely accepted paradigm for design of reconfigurable modems. The continuing march of Moore's law makes real-time signal processing on general purpose processors feasible for a large set of waveforms. Data rates in the low Mbps can be processed on low-power ARM processors, and much higher data rates can be supported on large x86 processors. The advantages of all-software development (vs. FPGA/DSP/GPU) are compelling - much wider pool of talent, lower development time and cost, and easier maintenance and porting. However, very high-rate systems (above 100 Mbps) are still firmly in the domain of custom and semi-custom hardware (mostly FPGAs). In this paper we describe an architecture and testbed for an SDR that can be easily scaled to support over 3 GHz of bandwidth and data rate up to 10 Gbps. The paper covers a novel technique to parallelize typically serial algorithms for phase and symbol tracking, followed by a discussion of data distribution for a massively parallel architecture. We provide a brief description of a mixed-signal front end and conclude with measurement results. To the best of the author's knowledge, the system described in this paper is an order of magnitude faster than any prior published result.