From MIMO-OFDM Algorithms to a Real-Time Wireless Prototype: A Systematic Matlab-to-Hardware Design Flow

Abstract

To assess the performance of forthcoming 4th generation wireless local area networks, the algorithmic functionality is usually modelled using a high-level mathematical software package, for instance, Matlab. In order to validate the modelling assumptions against the real physical world, the high-level functional model needs to be translated into a prototype. A systematic system design methodology proves very valuable, since it avoids, or, at least reduces, numerous design iterations. In this paper, we propose a novel Matlab-to-hardware design flow, which allows to map the algorithmic functionality onto the target prototyping platform in a systematic and reproducible way. The proposed design flow is partly manual and partly tool assisted. It is shown that the proposed design flow allows to use the same testbench throughout the whole design flow and avoids time-consuming and errorprone intermediate translation steps.

Leveraging Power Spectral Density for Scalable System-Level Accuracy Evaluation

“…Hierarchical techniques for evaluation of quantization noise power have been proposed [9], [4] to overcome the scalability concerns associated with fixed-point systems. In this approach, the system components are evaluated one at a time and then combined by superposition at the output (Fig.…”

“…In order to analytically arrive at the moments of the system output, additional information pertaining to quantization noise at points of convergence of two or more noise paths is required. We refer to the methods that do not consider PSD information (such as [9]) as PSDagnostic methods. In this section, we propose a technique which efficiently makes use of power-spectral-density (PSD) of the quantization noise for evaluating the error output and which is scalable both in terms of accuracy and system size.…”

An FPGA-accelerated testbed for hardware component development in MIMO wireless communication systems

“…The development of a signal-processing hardware component, as described for instance in [2], typically starts from the specification of the algorithm in a high-level language, such as Matlab or C++, using floating-point operations. As noted in [3], two major steps lead from the initial algorithmic specification to the hardware implementation:…”

Reconfigurable Stimulus Generator for Receive Beamformer Test-bed

“…The recent advances in FPGA technology makes architecture of PAA stimulus generator based on FPGA an attractive option. Few examples, MIMO systems, which is utilize multiple FPGA's and DSP's as discussed in [2]- [5]. Madani et al have described anantenna simulator, developed under a contract from European Space Agency (ESA), to evaluate the performance of an Adaptive Digital Beam Forming Network [6].…”