DOI 10.1155/ES/2006/81309 FPGA-Based Communications Receivers for Smart Antenna Array Embedded Systems

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are drawing ever increasing interest from designers of embedded wireless communica-tions systems. They outpace digital signal processors (DSPs), through hardware execution of a wide range of parallelizable commu-nications 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. Copyright © 2006 Constantin 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. 1