Daniel Iancu, John Glossner, Mihai Sima, Peter Farkas, Michael McGuire

“ Many SDR products have been introduced in the consumer market in the past few years, in both wireless infrastructure and user equipment, ranging from 2G to 4G. As process technology evolves, processors become more computationally capable pushing the borderline between software and hardware closer to the antenna. One of the main advantages of SDR is software reconfigurability that leads to significant design simplification for multimode receivers. Therefore, processor reconfigurability must be accompanied by multimode antennas as well as reconfigurable radios. ”

“ The instruction set takes the advantage of the fact that for some applications, it is not necessary to execute both a polymultiply and polyremainder for each GF multiplication resulting in significant computational expense saving. ”

“ The most computationally intensive functions, list sphere decoding, QR decomposition, fast Fourier transform, and turbo decoding are implemented in application-specific processors.
The second paper entitled “The Sandblaster Software Defined Radio Platform for Mobile 4G Wireless Communications,” by Surducan et al., presents an inexpensive PCI-e 4G SDR platform built around Sandblaster technology. With the multimode antenna system and flexible RF receiver, the platform is capable of executing in real-time multiple 3G and 4G communication protocols. ”