Software Defined Radio - Vision or Reality

Summary form only given. The idea of software defined radio, that is the vision of a generic hardware which can be programmed to manage any radio standards, is introduced. The radio challenge and the resulting very tough requirements on the receiver are discussed. Different options to the software defined radio architecture are described and practical implementations of different elements of the radio architecture are presented. An experimental widely tuneable LNA for the frequency range 0.75-3GHz is presented. A broadband LNA for the frequency range l-7GHz is described together with experimental results. Wideband sampling receivers, aimed for the 2.4 and 5.2GHz frequency bands and 20MHz bandwidth are presented together with some measured results. Another alternative, a direct SigmaDelta-conversion receiver is proposed. Finally, a flexible solution to the digital baseband implementation is described. This solution is a fully programmable DSP, specially adapted to baseband processing. It is shown that this processor saves considerable silicon area and shows no power penalty compared to traditional fixed solutions. In conclusion it is found that software defined radio is quite close to reality today