A flexible digital communications system for education

This thesis presents the design for a flexible digital communications system based on reprogrammable special-purpose microprocessors and reconfigurable hardware devices for use in the Digital Communications Laboratory (ECE 363) at the University of Illinois. The new design will serve as a replacement for the analog system currently in use, as well as provide a platform for further course development. The ECE 363 coursework involves BER measurements under different system configurations and parameters. The relevance of this work is that students acquire an intuition for which parts of the system are critical paths to overall system performance. A vital component to building this intuition is the ability to reconfigure the system to make reasonable comparisons between BER curves. The original lab equipment was designed in blocks to allow physical reconfiguration of the system. Unfortunately, the digital receiver is one of those blocks and is hardwired for its task, making receiver configuration difficult. A software-based configurable system is one alternative, but software systems are often too slow to run at high bitrates. Therefore, a system has been designed which leverages the advantages of both hardware and software design