| Ever since multimedia has started emerging as a widespread and rapidly growing industry, there has been a tremendous increase in the use of data-intensive applications. A Software Defined Radio (SDR) is one such application where-in the challenge is to digitize the wireless communication signals and transfer the data stream into the memory of a generic processor for demodulation in software. SDR poses a major requisite for computer interfaces which can handle high speed data transfers.; The focus of this research is to develop such an interface using a high speed Analog-to-Digital converter and a high performance serial bus known as the IEEE 1394 (aka FireWire, i.Link) that would enable the SDR application to run on a PC platform. The design consists of three major blocks. First is the Radio Frequency (RF) front end, which can tune to the spectrum of interest and generate the Intermediate Frequency (IF) signal. Second is the Analog to Digital interface, where a high speed A/D converter samples the IF signal. The digital samples are wrapped into packets by a FireWire I/O device (CardBus) and sent over the 1394 Serial Bus to the PC. The third block consists of the PC running a 1394 application to read the packets into memory for base-band processing in software. FireWire offers data rates up to 800Mbps and future rates up to 3.2Gbps, thus proving to be an ideal technology for real time interfaces. |
