eFalcon — A scalable prototyping platform for next generation communication systems

The recent years showed an increasing demand for higher data rates in communication systems in general. To keep up with the reduced time-to-market in this area, an elaborate prototyping concept is inevitable. The authors propose a prototyping platform which combines the advantages of the flexibility of a digital signal processor with the efficient parallelization capabilities of a field-programmable gate array. The primary purpose of this platform is to allow a real-time capable implementation of current as well as next generation communication standards. The focus has been put on the integration of the full communication chain from the antenna to the decoded bit stream. Since the ever increasing computational complexity complicates the dimensioning of such platforms, scalability was a crucial design constraint for the presented concept. Interconnecting multiple platforms can be used to establish even complex multi-antenna systems.