Initial development of wireless applications using FPGAs

In this paper we present a method to be used in the initial phase of wireless application development which is based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and which can result in the reduction of development time and cost. The increased number of resources of an FPGA chip and the flexibility in creating configurable embedded systems inside such a chip allows the creation of an entire wireless network where all nodes are located in a single such chip. The network built in this way can be used to validate in the initial phase of application development both the individual node functionality and the communication in the network. The methodology is based on Xilinx FPGA-based development boards and Xilinx EDK tools for development of embedded systems based on the MicroBlaze soft processor extended with Pmods small interface I/O boards from Digilent.