Rapid prototyping of 802.11 wireless modems

This paper describes the use of an FPGA based prototype to enable the rapid prototyping of IEEE 802.11 modems. Prototyping ASICs on a reconfigurable platform enabled concurrent development by the hardware and software teams, and provided a high degree of confidence in the designs. The capabilities of modern FPGAs and their development tools allowed easy and quick retargetting of the complex ASICs into FPGAs, enabling the integration of the prototyping effort into the design flow from the start of the project. The effect was to accelerate the development cycle and generate an ASIC which had been through one pass of beta testing before tape-out.