OQPSK COGNITIVE MODULATOR FULLY FPGA-IMPLEMENTED VIA DYNAMIC PARTIAL RECONFIGURATION AND RAPID PROTOTYPING TOOLS

Software Defined Radios (SDR) and Cognitive Radios, their evolution provided with the ability of making decisions about their operating behaviour, have emerged as the key technology for implementing wireless communication systems in the future, due to their versatility and to the size and power consumption save they obtain. This paper presents a small form factor OQPSK modulator able to change its IF (intermediate frequency) working frequency depending on the availability of the transmission channel. It is fully implemented on an FPGA using dynamic partial reconfiguration to achieve the frequency change, the internal ICAP configuration port to access FPGA’s configuration memory and an embedded uBlaze processor in charge of managing the whole system. Those parts of the modulator requiring digital signal processing have been carried out with Xilinx’s rapid prototyping tool System Generator in order to ease their development.