Omap Multi-core Software-defined Radio Platform Design And Realization

Portable software radio, with their light, ease of use and update features, is widely used in communication, traffic, and industry scopes. However, hardware designers must face the contradictions among performance, power consumption, and volume. These devices often require both powerful performance and friendly human-computer interaction. The traditional solutions usually consider using a micro-controller chip such as ARM or PowerPC, and a signal processing chip as those of DSP and FPGA. To obtain much higher performance, a chip array is frequently used. However, the portability feature of such devices determines that it should consume as less power and hold as smaller size as possible. Balance must be achieved among all these requirements.To solve these problems, the SoC technology is proposed. The craftsmanship in IC industry is still not advanced enough to implement a full sense SoC. However, the concept of it has already been applied worldwide, the OMAPTM 3 processor developed by TI being one of its cases. The OMAPTM 3 processor integrates one ARM core and one DSP core, thus retaining both of there advantages. Moreover, it simplifies hardware design, improves reliability and portability, and reduces circuit area and power consumption.This paper designs and implements a new kind of software radio platform, which, for the purpose of meeting high performance, low power and portable demands, takes advantage of OMAPTM 3 and FPGA.Firstly, this paper proposes the overall functional requirements of our developing system, to design and implement a portable software and hardware platform with low power consumption, which supports IF-baseband signal processing in wireless communication and software-hardware co-simulation.According to the system requirements and the features of OMAP3530 and FPGA, this paper successfully designs the hardware framework, including OMAP+FPGA architecture, analog signal processing, RF and audio ADC and DAC, memory, network, power and clock, then accomplishes the main chip selection.Then, it builds a complete software platform, including OMAP3530 dual-core processor software system migration, driver and application development, communication interface programming among OMAP3530, FPGA and other modules.In order to verify the feasibility of hte system, the RF input and output characteristics are analyzed respectively. And, by the frequency measurement and FM signal source experiments, the hardware and software structure, the interface between each modules, the signal-control processes and the system overall functionality are verified.The OMAP3530 based software radio platform provides an open and flexible hardware and software system, which brings great convenience to algorithm simulation, project pre-research, and product development.