Hardware-Software Co-Design of Sub-6 GHz Transceiver for Reconfigurable Prototyping

Digital radio frequency (RF) systems are becoming increasingly popular with the proliferation of software-defined radios (SDRs). This digitization is overtaking traditional-RF architectures that are often difficult to build and expensive to modify with many designs containing multiple complex-analog components. One way to efficiently implement a SDR is by using a hardware/software (HW/SW) co-design process, which concurrently generates and optimizes the HW and SW in an integrated fashion. This type of SDR realization allows engineers with various backgrounds to rapidly explore and assess different system configurations and algorithms without modifying any analog components. This paper demonstrates a SDR co-design methodology through the use of a wideband RF transceiver module connected to a field-programmable gate array for cost- effective and reconfigurable system prototyping. We demonstrate the power of this capability by creating an in-band full-duplex system that probes wireless channels using both radar and communications waveforms for multi-function applications.