A novel system on chip for software-defined, high-speed OFDM signal processing

Abstract

In this paper the authors describe a novel system on chip (SoC) that is especially developed for digital signal processing of high-speed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with data rates up to gigabits per second. Besides offering a new degree of freedom for the tradeoff between flexibility and performance during runtime, the modular concept of the SoC also allows a tradeoff between performance and costs during design time. The flexibility to adapt the OFDM system parameters by software enables even system designers without a good knowledge of hardware design to implement high-speed OFDM systems. An example configuration of the architecture was implemented on a Virtex-6 FPGA in order to set up a software-defined OFDM transmitter, achieving data rates of several gigabits per second. The paper closes with implementation and performance results of experiments using the developed transmitter and an optical transmission of the generated OFDM signals.