Abstract —This paper describes a flexible hardware and software
architecture that is simple, works with almost all Software Defined Radios (SDR) in market today and is vendor independent
in its implementation. Usually, an engineer targets a particular
platform which needs considerable time and manpower for
process of design and development. The proposed architecture
can be applied almost exclusively to the FPGAs, using a soft
processor core to perform basic software functions as well as
the main role of digital signal processing. The memory map to
other logic modules and external peripherals as well as a bootloader for loading the software image have been designed. A
FIFO based component interface has been designed to maintain communication between modules and external devices as
well as a data logger module for debug purposes. Since the
entire hardware-software ecosystem is built on a single FPGA
using Register Transfer Level (RTL) coding, it can freely be
used on any FPGA family by any FPGA vendor with minor
modifications. This allows us to build powerful SDR systems
even using basic FPGA kits, an RF-frontend and an Analog-toDigital (ADC) module. A survey of open source processor cores
is conducted to estimate resource usage and complexity on an
FPGA. This can be used to select an FPGA and a processor
core such that the entire system can run on a single FPGA.
This architecture is implemented on an existing SDR platform
and all features are successfully validated on the hardware.
Data logged from this system while running a sample signal
processing implementation, was tested in Matlab and was shown
to have correct time and frequency domain signals at various
points in the signal processing chain.