Demo abstract: A compact, inexpensive, and battery-powered software-defined radio platform

Abstract

We present μSDR, a compact, inexpensive, and battery-powered software-defined radio (SDR) platform built on a single-chip, flash-based FPGA fabric and ARM Cortex-M3 processor, enabling lower power and tighter hardware/soft-ware integration than prior commodity SDR platforms. Our architecture, unlike prior designs, is well-suited to hand-held or battery-operated systems and also supports cleaner partitioning since hardware can be easily mapped into the software addresses space, and vice versa. Building on this flexibility, we show how highly time-critical MAC protocols can be implemented on this platform and deployed using just AAA batteries.