Keynote speaker: Putting the radio into software defined radio ∼ and the meaning for arrays

While the digital influence increases in modern RF systems, there remain fixed design choices which reside within a system for many years. These fixed choices, often in the RF transceiver hardware of the system, increasingly become the limiting feature in the adaptability of a system. This talk will overview the efforts to push the adaptability up to the transceiver and through the physical antenna structure, with a highlight on the progress towards a programmable RF transceiver termed the “RF FPGA”. New research approaches towards generalizing the RF design space, which imply designing the system first and then adding the RF specifications second, will be shown. This development promises to impact the phased array area by allowing for many different applications of a single RF component, much as the FPGA is found ubiquitously throughout modern systems in the digital domain. However, many challenges exist to realizing this vision and the prospects of truly reprogrammable RF will be detailed.