Reconfiguration Challenges & Design Techniques in Software Defined Radio

The term ’Software Radio’ was coined by Joseph Mitola III to signal the shift from HW design dominated radio systems to systems where the major part of the functionality is defined in software. It creates a necessity of generic programmable hardware base that would allow software to enable various features. The concept of Reconfigurable computing allows the acceleration of computational processes by using variable configurations of specialized hardware. The FPGAs are opening a new door in digital processing environments by providing Reconfigurability at different granularity levels. Further, the reconfiguration models reduce overheads present in traditional systems. Finally, the combination of both digital signal processing devices such as DSP/GPPs and FPGAs can take advantage of their respective features. These platforms provide ways to propose architectures for optimized SDR execution platform, which may reduce the SDR device size, power consumption and cost significantly while maintaining a high degree of design and function switching flexibility.