SDR (Software Defined Radio)

SDR (Software Defined Radio)
This section covers an ambitious project. Let us imagine a wireless terminal made of 2 CPU blocks:  a powerful host armed with all media capabilities and a second block which can process any kind of RF signals and radio  protocols  (i.e 3G,4G, Wifi, gps, up to future standards such as cognitive radio). This second block is commonly called Software Defined Radio (SDR).

Background

The concept of SDR is as old as the radio [ref 1] but in our context we will put the burden on the solid shoulders of Les Mintzer circa 2000 [ref 2]. This was an FPGA implementation which makes a lot of sense as the money and impetus came from the military. In the same school see also Xilinx's Chris Dick, Spectrum's Lee Pucker and a few others [ref 3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Now at this stage their implementation of SDR was far from fitting the definition but it made sense. Worse was to come. Firstly, in a brilliant case of taking the tree for the forest, a bunch of guys were using the PC/pentium as their example of SDR.They could do everything except radio.

Frankly first time I heard about that, I thought of genius generating radio from a PC  by using the EMC radiation of the chips, this sounds silly but after all this was the time of UWB so why not?

And then we had the usual silicon valley trend: a new buzzword for a new type of chip architecture [ref 11,12,13].

Reference

1. Dan Stransberg  " A century old technology enters the digital age", EDN , October 28 1999
2. Les Mintzer "Soft Radios and modems and FPGA" CSD mag, february 2000 p.52
3. Chris Dick, Fred Harris "the platform FPGA Software defined Radio" good paper but no reference, likely a conference circa 2001
4. Chris Dick "FPGAs cranked for software radio" EET, April 10, 2000
5. Chris Dick " A case for using FPGAs in SDR Phy" EET, August 12,2002
6. Lee Pucker "Paving Paths to SDR" csd mag june 2001 p.19
7. Lee Pucker, Systems Architect, Spectrum Signal Processing "Distributed Architecture for SDR" CSD 2001
8. Robert Sgandura PM Pentek " W221: Software Radio - From concepts to Implementation" likely at Communication System Design conference 2000 or 2001
9. Cord Finlay "Understanding SDR requirements" Wireless System Design July 2001
10. "Soft Radio key to universal applications" EE Times Special Report March 19, 2001
1. so full of hope, fortunately Loring Wirbel deflated the hot air in EET aug 12, 2002.
11. John Ralston "SDR emerges to address wireless industry needs" Wireless System design october 2000 
1. Describes the Morphics architecture
12. Armin Nueckel, Prashant Rao "The use of Reconfigurable Processor Arrays in wireless Infrastructure Systems" July 25, 2001 {white paper?} 
1. Describes the PACT architecture
13. Paul Master "the baseband solution for the worldphone" www.quicksilver.com 2001