A Development and Testing Instrumentation for GPS Software Defined Radio With Fast FPGA Prototyping Support

The modernization of global positioning systems (GPS) boosts the development of civil and military applications as accuracy and coverage of receivers continually improve. Recently, software defined radio (SDR) approach for GPS receivers (GPS-SDR) gained attention because of its flexibility for multimode operations in different environments. The SDR receiver developers continually advance algorithmic and/or hardware accelerator solutions. However, they need fast prototyping and testing instrumentation to refine and evaluate high performance multimode receivers. This paper presents a feasibility study of fast prototyping of the GPS receiver accelerators using graphical user interface environments. It also describes a testbed with integrated RF front-ends, GPS simulator, receiver, and assistance support. Particularly, a novel host-target codesign solution is demonstrated using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) peripheral and LabVIEW FPGA tool for a case study of a GPS acquisition module. Distributing tasks between the FPGA target and the personal computer host achieves a high performance solution. The fast prototyped solution is compared with a conventional FPGA and state-of-the-art implementations.