An FPGA-Emulation-based Platform for Characterization of Digital Baseband Communication Systems

Integrated transceivers play a leading role in an ever-increasing range of systems and applications where dependability is a major concern. In order to reduce time-to-market, it is crucial to verify the correctness of the hardware and software implementations and the overall system performance at early stages of the design flow with respect to specifications or a higher-level model. To this purpose, we identify some specific requirements of these systems, and propose a new methodology for early validation and BER characterization taking into consideration channel noise and sampling frequency offset of the digital baseband communication subsystems. The proposed methodology is based on a low-cost FPGA platform and enables precise control of noise injection and clocking parameters during emulation, so as to reproduce channel and receiver non-ideality effects, while accelerating the validation process by orders of magnitude with respect to simulation-based alternatives. Experimental results on an industrial case consisting of the digital baseband portion of an ultra-wideband wireless link confirm the effectiveness of the approach.