All programmable SOC based standalone SDR platform for researchers and academia

Abstract

This paper describes the design of Software Defined Radio Platform (SDRP) using Xilinx ZYNQ SOC. SDRP is an advanced and affordable software defined radio with inbuilt cognitive capability and MIMO capability and is highly suited for academia and professional research. The SDRP is implemented using ZYNQ XC7Z030 all programmable SOC. XC7Z030 consists of dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 based processing system and 28 nm Xilinx programmable logic KINTEX-7. For the SDRP, AD9361 is used as the transceiver. The AD9361 combines a RF front end with a flexible mixed-signal baseband section and integrated frequency synthesizers, simplifying design-in by providing a configurable digital interface to a processor. AD9361 is fully programmable using ZYNQ SOC and thus the filter properties, decimation rates, and mixing frequencies can be modified as per user requirements. Linux OS is used in the processing system of SOC. All the waveform-specific processing, like modulation, demodulation, protocol stacks etc are done on the processing system. The high-speed general purpose operations like digital up and down conversion, decimation and interpolation are done on Kintex-7 programmable logic. SDRP has Ethernet interface and PCI Express interface for data transfer to other CPU's. Other interfaces include HDMI, USB, SD Card interface and JTAG interface. In the processing system various software toolkit such as GNU radio, MATLAB etc can be used for waveform processing.