Implementing a Radio Virtual Machine on the MAGALI chip

International audienceTime to market is a key for commercial success of a SDR chip. Reusing hardware and reusing modern software development paradigms are the means to achieve a shorter time to market. Our work concerns the fast and portable development of new physical layer protocols (or waveforms) expressed in software, referred as "SDR programs". "Develop once, run anywhere" is the objective for SDR programs. It consists in providing full portability of waveforms between SDR platforms. To reach this portability the waveform specification must be expressed independently of its implementation, but also the executable specification should be, in some sense, independent of the implementation platform. Indeed, an SDR application should be able to download new waveform programs without knowing the implementation details of the chip it runs on. This problem can be solved with the use of a virtual machine: each SDR platform embed a virtual machine (VM) tuned to its own architectural details. All these VMs are able to interpret the same waveform executable specification expressed in a byte-code format. In this study we propose a virtual-machine based programming model applied to SDR that we call "Radio Virtual Machine" (RVM)