Evaluation of High-Level open-source tool-flows for rapid prototyping of Software Defined Radios

Advances in integrated circuit technology are enabling construction of increasingly more powerful architectures for Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms. For instance multicores, multiprocessor System-on-Chip and FPGAs provide opportunities for innovative prototyping and increased programmability whereby more radio processing is done in the digital domain. But there are challenges with these technologies, especially difficulties of efficiently harnessing their capabilities in a productive manner. There are two general approaches that respond to this: 1) a shift from low-level to high-level design, using for example model-integrated computing; or 2) frameworks that usually require low-level expertise to adapt reusable code. In case 1 a portion of expertise is offloaded to tools - but effort is needed to learn the tool and debugging may be difficult. In case 2 the tool may be widely used but needs more low-level coding. This paper investigates the first approach and reflects on our more common practice of using coding frameworks. The methodology involved developing the same SDR processing operations with each tool. A system engineering approach was used whereby a generic Ideal High-Level SDR (IHS) tool flow was established as a baseline to compare the tools. We conclude with a summary of the qualitative capabilities of the tools.