Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology seeks to solve the problem of multiple incompatible broadcast/telecom standards available in different locations, by having standard specific processing defined in software. This software will be downloaded and run on generic hardware, so that different broadcast/telecom standards can be supported by downloading corresponding software modules. Computing platform based SDR attempts to bridge the worlds of computing and broadcast/telecoms, by exposing the features and resources of computers to SDR and vice versa. However, such a concept results in certain architectural issues that need to be resolved. This paper describes the concept of Computing Platform based SDR, and the resulting issues & desired features of such a system. An innovative system architecture that involves the supervised partial self-reconfiguration of a single FPGA is proposed and detailed. Finally, a system test is conducted to illustrate and verify the reconfiguration operation.
Citation:
Oliver Faust, Bernhard Sputh, Darran Nathan, Sana Rezgui, Andreas Weisensee, Alastair Allen, "A Single-Chip Supervised Partial Self-Reconfigurable Architecture for Software Defined Radio," ipdps, pp.191a, International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'03), 2003