Research & Implementation Of The FLEX Protocol

The multi-channel, roaming FLEX protocol has been adopted as a standard for high speed roaming paging in China. Although the prevalence of mobile phone has imposed heavy pressure in domestic and east-southern Asia market, the paging industry will still play an important role in people's daily life due to its unique advantages.Based on the understanding of FLEX protocol, this dissertation puts its focus on the application-oriented data service, and implements successfully an ASIC design of FLEX decoder using FPGA. This is the first time that China has its own intellectual property of the FLEX decoder, which may bring great social and economic benefit to the country.The main works of the dissertation are as follows.The challenge that the pager industry faces is discussed. It is emphasized that pagers will survive from the impact of mobiles' prevalence and the information service based on the unidirectional pager system will make contribution to the future growth of paging industry.A thorough discussion is made to analyze the pager protocols and their characteristics. The channel coding, roaming, and frame assignment and other critical issues of the FLEX protocol are studied, and a FPGA implementation of FLEX decoder has been developed.The paper also discusses the general procedure of ASIC design and some issues about design for testability (DFT). The test method, strategy and principle of DFT in the synchronous circuit design are fully explored. Compared with the traditional design procedure, the fault coverage can be greatly improved provided that the DFT was introduced at the RTL design stage.The prototype of information service protocol set based on the pager system is defined to make it possible to provide a uniform access interface for information...