Area and power-efficient reconfigurable digital down converter on FPGA

This paper presents a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based digital down converter (DDC) that can reduce the bandwidth from about 70 MHz to 182.292 kHz. The proposed DDC consists of a polyphase COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) processor and a multirate filter. The advantage of polyphase CORDIC processor is to process with high sample rate input data and produces computational efficient noiseless baseband spectrum. The pipeline multirate filter works at a high clock speed. Moreover, the multirate filter generates a fractional sample rate factor using a cubic B-spline Farrow filter. The proposed DDC is coded with optimal hardware description language (HDL) and tested on Kintex-7 Xilinx FPGA as the target device. Experimental results indicate that the proposed design saves chip area, power consumption and operates at high speed without loss of any functionality. Additionally, the proposed design offers sufficient spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) and produces less than 1 Hz frequency resolution at the output.