A Software-Programmable Multiple- Standard Radio Platform

Future wireless terminals will have to be multiband, multi-standard and able to execute multiple standards concurrently. In this paper we describe a flexible and programmable baseband platform for a large variety of mobile and WLAN standards. For the SDR platform architecture our primary design goal was to find the most flexible and easy-to-program solution within a specified power budget. The result is an architecture consisting of a cluster of four single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) DSP cores each containing four processing elements and operating at 300 MHz. The cluster of SIMD cores is accompanied by dedicated processors for filtering operations, and channel encoding and decoding. Beside a programming environment for this platform consisting of an application programming interface (API), compiler and debugger, and a virtual prototype of the hardware, we investigate alternatives for a model based design approach Profiling results for the digital signal processing software performing the PHY layer of IEEE 802.11b on the virtual prototype underline the feasibility of our approach.