FPGA-Based Wireless System Design

"As the market for wireless infrastructure matures equipment vendors are under increasing pressure to deliver low-cost solutions to operators. With today's complex and rapidly evolving wireless technologies, cost of ownership is typically influenced by both initial capital investment and the ongoing cost of upgrading field installations. Solutions based on digital signal processors (DSPs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are attractive because they enable upgrade installation over a network from a central site.
Besides their field programmability, speed, and flexibility, FPGAs also lend themselves to rapid design and verification. In this article, we demonstrate an FPGA design flow that uses a combination of the Simulink family of products, Xilinx System Generator for DSPtm, and Xilinx FPGAs. Specifically, we focus on a receiver design for a 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) telemetry system."
 
By Narinder Lall, Xilinx, Inc.
 
This article appeared in The MathWorks News & Notes, January 2006