An SDR inspired design for the FPGA implementation of 802.11a baseband system

Software Defined Radio (SDR) technologies and concepts have become one of the most important topics of research particularly in communications as it aims to deliver greater platform flexibility when compared with conventional radio technology. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)s have been suggested as an enabling technology for the hardware platform of an offered was SDR system although the programmability of relatively course grained in that designs could only be altered through a complex set of software tools with the whole device having to be reprogrammed to change its operation. The SelectMAP interlace of the Xilinx Virtex FPGA introduced a means where the configuration data applied represents only a fraction of a full configuration file. However, the flexibility is restricted and, in order to maximise flexibilty the hardware platform functional objects must relate themselves to both the architecture of the device and the requirements of other objects implemented within the device. In this paper we define SDR functional objects suitable for implementation on an FPGA and provide an example of applying these techniques to the part of the 802.11a baseband definition that offers variable coding and modulation.