Characterisation and verification of an FPGA signal generator for spectrally efficient wireless FDM

For research and development in computationally intensive bandwidth efficient Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) systems, it is generally preferable to implement test systems in hardware. This has the benefit of speed improvement over simulation and enables the generation and evaluation of real signals. This paper describes a system implementation of a versatile signal generator featuring high speed and large bit-depth Digital to Analogue Converters (DACs), RAM storage and an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to perform multi-carrier real time signal generation. Since the validity of such generated signals requires qualification by characterisation of the generating hardware, this paper describes a measurement methodology and presents results and comparison to vendor specification.