Abstract

With the advent of software-defined radio, many radio applications have and are currently being designed for FPGAs, due to their high performance and reconfigurability. Invariably, "legacy" waveforms, such as FM, will need to be supported in such systems. A challenge that comes with programming FPGAs is the increased design and implementation time over conventional software programming. In this thesis, three FM demodulator techniques are implemented and compared in an FPGA. Two techniques are found to have similar SNR performance while having very different FPGA implementation characteristics. Library based design is explored for demodulators to increase FPGA design productivity. A block library is created and verified by use in tested demodulator designs. Two design tools that aim to increase design productivity in FPGAs, Ogre and HMFlow, are also examined and used to implement FM demodulators in a PCM/FM receiver design. Ogre leverages the demodulator block library, along with accompanying metadata, to decrease design time significantly. Design performance is not sacrificed when using Ogre. HMFlow, which relies on finer-grained blocks, reuses block implementation data to speed up implementation of the full design. The implementation of the HMFlow demodulator design is sped up by 3x but, when compared with the standard flow, produces an implementation with a reduced maximum clock rate (about 1/2) and with slightly more resources (about 6%). When comparing Ogre with HMFlow, the coarser-grained blocks of Ogre provide a more efficient design experience than that of HMFlow.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2011-03-30

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd4357

Keywords

FPGA, software-de ned radio, frequency modulation, design productivity

Language

English

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