Beamforming and MIMO Digital Radio Baseband and Testbed for Next Generation Wireless Systems

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Acknowledgement Special thanks to Borivoje Nikolic, Elad Alon, and Vladmir Stojanovic for their guidance. I'd also like to thank the graduate students at BWRC for their help and support throughout the project: Introduction With the recent surge in wireless communications, the radio industry has seen an increase in the number of different communication standards, each requiring its own specific hardware and processing. Our project is part of a larger effort to address the need for radio interoperability with these various standards through the development of hardware generators for a software defined radio (SDR) system. These hardware generators will be created using Chisel, a hardware construction language. When given a set of parameters or constraints, the hardware generators will automatically output circuit designs for the given application, thereby accelerating the hardware design process and introducing a new method for multi-standard support. Specifically, our team was tasked with the development of generators for the system's smart antenna (i.e. beamforming and MIMO) blocks. For this project, our team accomplished the design of two hardware generators: the CORDIC and the MIMO Receiver blocks. The CORDIC block is simply a set of hardware efficient algorithms capable of performing hyperbolic and trigonometric calculations without the use of a hardware multiplier. By avoiding use of hardware multipliers, the CORDIC architecture reduces the number of logic gates required to perform these trigonometric calculations, thereby saving significant circuit power and area in exchange for less accuracy. The MIMO block consists of smart antenna techniques useful for multiple antenna radio systems. These techniques, in essence, provide improved spectral efficiency (i.e. better signal and data speeds) and have become a necessity for almost any modern radio system. 3 The work breakdown for the design tasks involved are depicted in the diagram below (see Figure 1). For the CORDIC block, tasks consisted of three primary components: enabling hardware generation for variable data lengths, adding compatibility for fixed and double data types and thoroughly validating the block's functionality. The CORDIC block has a wide range …