A Traceable Workflow for Software Defined Radio Development
(Room 203)
17 Oct 18
1:05 PM
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1:35 PM
Tracks:
RF & MW Design/Workflow
The current industry trend for RF systems is to move from ASICs to programmable Systems on Module (SoM) or Systems on Chip (SoC), integrating RF transceivers with programmable logic and CPU cores. Signal processing blocks that traditionally were implemented in ASICs are now provided as IPs, comprising both HDL and software, which are deployed in the programmable logic and the processing units of the new RF systems yielding much more flexibility in terms of functionality, application specificity and update/upgrade capabilities. Developing these IPs requires deep knowledge of communications and signal processing algorithms and of all the caveats that show up when these algorithms are deployed into the real world and face impairments that are commonly overlooked in theoretical analysis. This disconnect coupled with traditionally hardware centric designs is departing to new software focused implementations where SDR has become the dominant approach for any wireless prototyping and development. This paper focuses on a design flow for software defined radio that exploits current tooling paradigms and provides an avenue for traditionally separate development teams to work in this new converged methodology. This is approached through an example design of a software defined modem targeting the Analog Devices ADRV9361-Z7035 SoM, based on the AD9361 agile RF transceiver and the Xilinx Zynq SoC. The paper discusses the tools, the design and deployment processes and brings to light the challenges encountered to successfully run the system in the real world. In this work we explicitly define design stages to complement tool flow and design goals, from initial simulation, through prototyping and finally into production. Defining and implementing the functionalities that can move into software is not a trivial task and needs to be based on an understanding of the system's use cases as well of all the issues that can show up during real life operation. The goal of the example design was to implement a full stack software defined modem using state of the art model based design methodologies and automatic HDL code generation tools from the MathWorks as well as industry standard software technologies. Relying on Linux as an operating system, on open source software and on standard interfaces allowed the design to easily and rapidly integrate with other applications. The outcome of the project was a practical implementation of a wireless point to point link between two radios, with applications in UAV video transmission, high speed wireless data links, internet of things and cognitive radio.