Design and realization of a high bit-rate flexible wireless indoor transceiver

This article deals with the design and realization of a 17 GHz OFDM wireless indoor transceiver, a prototype used to verify new concepts introduced by the EU IST research project WIND-FLEX. The emphasis in the WIND-FLEX project has been on the profitable use of CPU and FPGA tools for the purpose of demonstrating a very high bit-rate, wireless indoor modem, with adaptivity and reconfigurability features for the lower layers (i.e., PHY and DLC/MAC layers). The development of the WIND-FLEX transceiver required the use of complex techniques and the design of a powerful hardware platform. The hardware/software partitioning has acted as an implementation guideline. The most demanding algorithms in terms of computational effort and performance requirements, i.e. baseband processing, has been designed in VHDL and implemented using FPGA, while MAC/DLC protocols have been developed in C code running in a CPU.