Software Defined Radio (SDR) will be a reality this time next year, enabled either by multiple-processor technology, or by reconfigurable FPGA, or both.
“Software defined baseband we’ve got nailed,” said Rupert Baines, v-p of marketing at multi-processor specialist PicoChip.
“Software defined RF is just about becoming do-able. People are coming along with new architectures like BitWave in Boston, AsicAhead in Belgium and TechnoConcepts in Southern California. They’ve all got things that work from a few hundred MHz to a few GHz on any standard you like. So you plug in one of our chips, and you can have a radio on any standard, with any frequency, and any air interface,” said Baines.
Asked when this would happen, Baines replied: “We’re talking about 3GSM next year. You’ll download a piece of software and have GSM, then you’ll download another piece of software and it’ll be WiMAX, and you’ll download another bit of software and run HSDPA 2.1,” said Baines. “We’re always proud about our own technology, then you meet someone with technology like that and you ask: ‘You think you can do that? How on earth do you do that?’”
For software defined baseband, FPGA is also possible. “Equally you can use Xilinx,” said Baines. “It’s all in the detail which is the best way to do it.” There has already been some diagreement about how SDR will be built. Professor Christer Svensson of Linkoping University in Sweden recently told Electronics Weekly that "configurable logic is certainly not the solution".
Dave Nicklin, a senior manager at Xilinx, said: “There’s the array of DSP guys like PicoChip, then there is us. Should it be done all on DSP? Or all on reconfigurable FPGA? Or a hybrid of the two? Where FPGA has uniqueness is that it doesn’t drop traffic when it re-configures. When it’s changing from a GSM to, say, a US military radio, it’ll re-configure that part of the block which isn’t dealing with current traffic. It can carry traffic in one part of the chip while the other part is configuring.”