Towards the implementation of Multi‐band Multi‐standard Software‐Defined Radio using Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration

Abstract

Summary The vast evolution of fixed and mobile standards urges upgrading the hardware to be compatible with them. An efficient approach to reduce the required cost and effort is hardware reusability, which in turn can be achieved by a dynamically reconfigurable field programmable gate array (FPGA). This flexible hardware time multiplexing allows more logic to fit within the same area, which means fitting bigger designs into smaller less expensive devices, with more optimization of power consumption. This work shows the advantages of using the dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) technique, on a fine‐grained block level, in implementing a baseband physical layer processing module for software‐defined radio (SDR) chain that supports 3G, long‐term evolution (LTE), and WIFI standards. The benefits increase when the reconfiguration is not only dynamic but also takes place in run‐time without the need to switch off the system. A comparison is held on Xilinx Virtex 5 design kit XUPV5‐LX110T between the implementation of the baseband processing module with and without using the DPR technique in the 3G, long‐term evolution, and WIFI standards. The comparison addresses the area, power, memory, and time overhead. Experimental results reveal that the DPR technique improves the area and the power consumption with an acceptable increase in memory and latency. Xilinx ISE 14.7 is used for modules implementation, Xilinx PlanAhead is used in floorplanning for the different designs and applying the DPR technique, and Xilinx Power Analyzer is used to measure the power consumption.