ANNOUNCEMENTS

Redefining Software Defined Radio
BitWave’s SDR for the Masses

Software Defined Radio (SDR) is certainly one of the hottest buzzword technologies being bantered about these days. Although most current SDR development was started in the military with initiatives like the US government’s Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), the advantages of the approach extend far beyond military use, and the technology is now center stage for consideration in many commercial embedded applications as well. SDR offers flexibility and field-upgradeability to RF systems that simply cannot be matched by traditional analog-based RF design techniques.

The typical architectural approach to SDR locates a wideband analog-to-digital converter (ADC) very near the antenna of an RF system in order to sample and digitize incoming RF waveforms. The channel modulation scheme is therefore implemented completely in software, so down-conversion and demodulation happen entirely in the digital domain, typically on a digital signal processor (DSP) or other general purpose processor. This setup is extremely versatile, of course, because the software that defines the scheme can be swapped on the fly, so one hardware platform can implement an almost infinite variety of radio standards without modification.

An obvious commercial application that would benefit from this approach are mobile phones, where a plethora of competing standards has burdened the industry with building a large number of variants of each handset in order to support service providers and standards around the world. The problems with stuffing SDR into a cell phone, however, boil down to our old friends - price, performance, and power. That wideband ADC is an expensive function in any implementation and only gets more expensive in the frequency ranges used by mobile phone carriers. Right behind the ADC, the power consumption, price, and silicon area of DSP processors that can handle the problem are all well above the budgets of even the most high-end cell phone projects. It has always been cheaper to implement multiple transceivers in a single phone than to try to slide into an SDR solution. [more]

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