Hardware accelerated multichannel receiver

Software-based radios implemented on general-purpose processors are cheaper, easier, and faster to develop, maintain, and upgrade than hardware-based equivalents. Unfortunately, today´s general-purpose processors are not fast enough to process certain waveforms. The current alternative is to use application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for all the signal processing. These operate at very high speeds but are dramatically more expensive and require lengthy development cycles. A single, often small, block is responsible for the bulk of signal processing in a large class of radios. It is therefore very wasteful to implement all the signal processing in a high-speed device such as an ASIC or FPGA. In this paper, we present a software-centric architecture that offloads only the most computationally expensive tasks to an FPGA. The resultant system combines the advantages of both platforms, while minimizing the disadvantages of each. An open-source software radio platform is combined with a consumer off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGA development board to create a hardware-accelerated multichannel receiver. The FPGA is efficiently utilized by partitioning the device into multiple accelerator regions and taking advantage of runtime partial reconfiguration to reconfigure each region as needed during operation. Comparisons between a software-only receiver and a hardware-accelerated implementation are performed.