An integrated development platform of a reconfigurable radio processor for software defined radio

Abstract

Performance required by "Software Defined Radio (SDR)" poses many challenges in real-time applications because of their high computational complexity. Designing a high performance SDR with a high degree of flexibility becomes an issue of importance. While the fastest programmable DSP processors are unable to meet the speed requirements for SDR, FPGAs also cannot offer the highest possible performance at the lowest silicon cost for a given signal processing function. Moreover, they are not optimized for radio applications because of their LUT based approach. To overcome the limitations of both DSP Processor and FPGAs, Radio Processor, a reconfigurable Processor optimized for Radio applications was conceived.[14],[17]. However, advantages of this Radio Processor cannot be made useful unless there is an integrated development environment to develop SDR. This paper addresses these issues by introducing a new Integrated Development platform for reconfigurable "Radio Processor" for implementing SDR.