Design and maintenance of physical processing for reconfigurable radio systems

The concept of the reconfigurable radio system requires new methods for the design and maintenance of the signal processing hardware and its flexible software and configurations. Existing methods used for hardware and software codesign need modification to take into account increased redundancy and how it may be used dynamically throughout the lifetime of the hardware platform. This paper describes the design flow used to build a reconfigurable processing demonstrator which is primarily intended to reconfigure between DCS1800 and UTRA air interfaces. This demonstrator forms part of the EU funded CAST (configurable radio with advance software technology) project