Design and Development of an FPGA Board for Software-Defined Radio Research

Abstract

This paper describes the design and development of a cost-affordable yet powerful software-defined radio system. The main application environment of the board is in academia where it is used to deliver a multidisciplinary approach in a number of fundamental engineering topics in communications. A moderately fast ADC together with an audio DAC are used for the analog components while an off-the-shelf FPGA is used as the digital processing element. To demonstrate the boards capabilities, hardware blocks to demodulate amplitude modulation and digital modulation were developed.