Design and Implementation of Digital Down Converter for WiFi Network

Abstract

This paper introduces a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based digital down converter (DDC) processing a sampling frequency of about 3.64 GHz to a down-converted frequency of 28.4375 MHz to match the IEEE 802.11ah Wi-Fi HaLow standard. The proposed DDC uses a polyphase mixer(PM) and a resampling filter. The PM adopts parallel coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) processors and lowpass filter arrays to reduce high-speed data rates with minimum resource utilization. Again, the resampling filter employs a cascaded integrator comb (CIC) filter associated with a parallel prefixed adder (PPA) and a multi-channel systolic finite impulse response (FIR) filter implemented with canonical expression, attaining optimum hardware cost. Converting floating-point to fixed-point data types provides significant resource savings. Finally, the improved design is coded in the Xilinx Vivado synthesis tool and successfully tested on the FPGA Kintex-7 device. In contrast to other recent architectures, the proposed design substantially reduces area requirements and power utilization. The Matlab tool verifies the design to achieve an acceptable spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 115 dB.