This article is part of the series Field-Programmable Gate Arrays in Embedded Systems.

Open Access Research Article

FPGA-Based Communications Receivers for Smart Antenna Array Embedded Systems

Constantin Siriteanu1,2*, Steven D Blostein1 and James Millar3

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada, K7L 3N6

2 Communications Signal Processing Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, Korea

3 CMC Microsystems, Kingston, ON, Canada, K7L 3N6

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EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems 2006, 2006:081309 doi:10.1155/ES/2006/81309


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jes.eurasipjournals.com/content/2006/1/081309


Received:15 December 2005
Revisions received:7 May 2006
Accepted:2 June 2006
Published:10 October 2006

© 2006 Siriteanu et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are drawing ever increasing interest from designers of embedded wireless communications systems. They outpace digital signal processors (DSPs), through hardware execution of a wide range of parallelizable communications transceiver algorithms, at a fraction of the design and implementation effort and cost required for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). In our study, we employ an Altera Stratix FPGA development board, along with the DSP Builder software tool which acts as a high-level interface to the powerful Quartus II environment. We compare single- and multibranch FPGA-based receiver designs in terms of error rate performance and power consumption. We exploit FPGA operational flexibility and algorithm parallelism to design eigenmode-monitoring receivers that can adapt to variations in wireless channel statistics, for high-performing, inexpensive, smart antenna array embedded systems.

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