A transceiver concept based on a software defined radio approach

In this communication, a software defined radio (SDR) transceiver design, termed FALCON, will be presented. The FALCON is entirely based on a modular signal processing concept; the FALCON receiver uses modules which process and generate log-likelihood ratio (LLR) signals, hence, providing the capability of a plug-and-play-type re-configurability. The authors' view on re-configurability will be discussed in this communication. The FALCON currently deploys commercial radio frequency (RF) front-tends provided by Atmel, analogue and interface boards developed and implemented by the authors and DSP Starter Kits (DSK) based on TI TMS320C6416 DSPs (digital signal processors), which have been provided by Texas Instruments. The hardware/software integration has been done in the laboratory of the authors. Furthermore, the authors developed all signal processing modules in C language tailored for the TMS320C6416 DSPs. This paper will also illustrate measurement results obtained with the FALCON will be given. For an easy comparison of these results with widely published simulation results the authors will consider UMTS/W-CDMA. It will be shown that the FALCON provides a superb performance.