FPGA-based Platform for SDR Prototyping

NICOLÁS ASSELLE; MARTÍN AYARDE; JUAN PABLO LEAL LICUDIS; MAXIMILIANO BUSTOS; GRACIELA CORRAL BRIONES

Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires

Simposio; 1st IAA Latin American Symposium on Small Satellites; 2017

Colomb Institute CONAE-UNSAM

Abstract?The adoption of cognitive radio technology in both terrestrial and satellite communications will enable not only to handle multiple signals frommultiple frequency bands but also to use additional spectrum in shared bands. Software Defined Radio (SDR) is a key technology to share and dynamicallyaccess the spectrum. It provides flexibility and reconfigurability with fast development times, reduced costs, and Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. In this paper we present a modular architecture design of an SDR platform based on a reconfigurable RF transceiver and an universal FPGA board, with a Gigabit Ethernet interface reaching baseband data speed rates of 123 MB/s and all the flexibility of a GNU/Linux. As our implementation uses less than 10% of FPGA, plenty resources are available for complex SDR designs, like multiple carrier baseband communication systems and MIMO processing.