Rapid prototyping with the visual data environment of an OFDM WLAN system

Abstract

In this paper a rapid prototyping design flow is presented and applied to a prototype of the base-band physical layer of a Hiperlan/2 WLAN transceiver. This physical layer is a high performance multi-rate system that contains computationally intensive algorithms. A new method for prototyping the design flow and verifying the process is to use the latest generation of system level design environments (visual data flow environment) for DSPs. The System Generator and Matlab/Simulink tools form a visual data flow environment for FPGA allow us to model DSP systems and explore algorithms. This environment also translates designs into hardware implementations that are faithful, synthesizable and efficient, which can be explored and refined in rapid prototyping platforms.