FPGA implementation of reconfigurable modulation system

Communication systems are extensively used in a large number of applications such as radar, aerospace, naval/maritime communication, underwater communication, mobile communication and many more. The most important module in designing communication system includes design of modulators. Different applications demand different types of modulators. Reconfigurable computing is considered as a state-of-the-art approach for system design, wherein the same hardware can reconfigure itself to perform different functionalities and is hence employed for various applications. Design and implementation of reconfigurable modulators on Virtex-5 FPGA is proposed in this paper, wherein the type of modulation can be dynamically reconfigured on-the-fly based on the requirement at any particular instance. The type of modulators that are used for reconfiguration in this work includes Amplitude Modulation (AM), Frequency Modulation (FM), Frequency Shift Keying (FSK), Phase Shift Keying (PSK), and Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK). In this paper, different approaches of triggering employed for proposed reconfigurable modulator design is reported. Also the proposed design is implemented using single and two reconfigurable blocks and the results are reported. It is observed that 10.20 - 91.43% of hardware resources and 76.38% of power are saved on using the proposed reconfigurable modulator over the conventional non-reconfigurable modulator design.