A PROGRAMMABLE BASEBAND PLATFORM FOR SOFTWARE-DEFINED RADIO

Future wireless terminals will have to be multi-band, multi- standard and able to execute multiple standards concur- rently. In this paper we describe a flexible and programma- ble baseband platform for a large variety of mobile and WLAN standards. For the SDR platform architecture our primary design goal was to find the most flexible and easy- to-program solution within a specified power budget. The result is an architecture consisting of a cluster of four single- instruction multiple-data (SIMD) DSP cores each containing four processing elements and operating at 300 MHz. The cluster of SIMD cores is accompanied by dedicated proces- sors for filtering operations, and channel encoding and de- coding. The programming environment of this platform con- sists of an application programming interface (API), com- piler and debugger, and a virtual prototype of the hardware. Profiling results for the digital signal processing software performing the PHY layer of IEEE 802.11b on the virtual prototype underline the feasibility of our approach.