A Rapid Prototyping Methodology for Algorithm Development in Wireless Communications

Rapid prototyping has become an important means to verify the performance and feasibility of algorithms and concepts for wireless communications. This paper presents an FPGA/DSP based rapid prototyping methodology and platform that requires only minimal IC/FPGA design skills and merely a very basic knowledge of hardware description languages such as VHDL. It allows algorithm designers to implement their ideas quickly and to test them in real-time under real world conditions. The design and implementation of a WCDMA downlink is used as an example to describe our initial experience with the proposed flow.

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