212 / 2016-01-08 10:36:50

A software radio platform based on ARM and FPGA

9092,3632,9093,9094,9095,9096

The rapid rise in computational performance offered by computer systems has greatly increased the number of practical software radio applications. A scheme presented in this paper is a software radio platform based on ARM and FPGA. FPGA works as the coprocessor together with the ARM, which serves as the core processor. ARM is used for digital signal processing and real-time data transmission, and FPGA is used for synchronous timing control and serial-parallel conversion. A SPI driver for real-time data transmission between ARM and FPGA under ARM-Linux system is provided. By adopting modular design, the software radio platform is capable of implementing wireless communication functions and satisfies the requirements of real-time signal processing platform for high security and broad applicability.
With the rapid development of Software Radio technology, Software Radio technology has become a hotspot of research. Software Radio is a new architecture for wireless communication based on digital signal processing and microelectronics technology. In this paper, an ARM and FPGA based software radio platform is designed according to the needs of actual system in digital signal processing and wireless communication, which take full advantage of the flexibility of ARM and the parallelism of FPGA. The choice of ARM is Freescale’s IMX6, which has a rich instruction set and programming flexibility; FPGA has a great advantage in the speed and parallel computing, suitable for requirements for real-time data transmission.
This paper begins with an overview of the software radio platform, including hardware components and data-stream transmission on the platform. It then moves on to describe the design of data transmission interface between ARM and FPGA. An explanation of how the SPI driver can implement real-time data transmission between ARM and FPGA under ARM-Linux system will be presented after that. The sequential logic and the transmission of multi-data in FPGA is explained at the end of this paper.