Software-based giga-bit WLAN platform

The design of baseband processor usually requires hardware and software co-design because of the partitioned functions over the ASIC hardware and DSPs. The portion of DSP is recently increasing as the computing power of DSP is sufficient to run the most baseband algorithms. In the paper, we deal with software-defined WLAN modem of IEEE 802.11ac covering most functions of baseband with DSP software. The receiver software is designed for the in-house DSP core that has 3 vector function units with 512-bit SIMD instructions running at 1GHz clock. To show the feasibility of 1Gbit/sec WLAN platform, we first utilize the SystemC simulation, and then implement the RTL and relevant software for the digital only baseband on the FPGA testbed. The SystemC simulation is 100 times faster than RTL simulation, to verify the full functionality of the baseband by presenting the text data transfer at 1.3Kbit/sec. We also demonstrate a video streaming of 20Mbit/sec on the FPGA testbed running at 20MHz by down-scaling the signal processing speed by the factor of 1/50.