Abstract:
Software Defined Radios (SDRs) are growing in popularity in our increasingly multi-
standard wireless world. As a result, platforms have been developed to provide powerful
and flexible SDR implementations. These platforms tend towards a heterogeneous mix
of software (SW) and hardware (HW) components, requiring HW/SW codesign to be an
integral part of SDR development. Previous work in the area of SDR codesign has focused
on finding optimal HW/SW partitions of a physical layer design that minimize the latency
of a single channel. The purpose of this research is to provide a new focus for SDR codesign,
that of multi-channel HW/SW codesign. These codesign efforts focus on maximizing the
number of simultaneous transmission channels that can run on a codesign SDR platform.
A method for deriving models that represent the HW/SW components and the interface
between them is presented. The results of this method are general equations describing
the HW/SW timing constraints for a multi-channel implementation. An application of the
method and models is provided in a Codesign Decision Engine (CDE) that takes as inputs
characteristics of a case-study platform, and outputs a predicted number for transmission
channel capacity for both a baseline and improved impelmenation. The method and models
are verified by actual application performance on the platform under test.
