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The Wireless Innovation Forum, working in collaboration with
the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) P1900.1 standards
group has defined “Software Defined Radio (SDR)” as:
“Radio in which some or all of the physical layer functions
are software defined”
Once only theoretically possible, the rapidly evolving
capabilities of digital electronics have vaulted SDR into reality. Coined in
1984 by a team at the Garland, Texas Division of E-Systems Inc., the original
concept was a digital baseband receiver that provided programmable interference
cancellation and demodulation for broadband signals, typically with thousands
of adaptive filter taps, using multiple array processors accessing shared
memory.
Steve Hicks, VP of Engineering for FlexRadio Systems
believes, “Because SDRs use fundamentally different architectures, an
organization must relearn many of the implementation details and come up to
speed on the new technologies (DSP, FPGAs, etc...) instead of mixers and analog
filters. A typical organization could go from heavily weighted towards EEs to
an organization with a majority of software engineers… It takes time to absorb
and get comfortable with these new technologies.”
Radios exist in many items including cell phones, computers,
car door openers, vehicles and televisions, etc… Providing an efficient and
comparatively inexpensive solution to building multi-mode, multi-band,
multi-functional communications devices upgradable through software, SDR is
applicable across a wide range of wireless industries.
Lee Pucker, CEO, The Wireless Innovation Forum and Joe
Madden of Mobile Experts believes SDR technology offers benefits which are
extremely compelling for system designers, including:
- Flexibility to handle multiple radio formats (such as 2G, 3G
and 4G mobile telephony standards) using a common platform;
- Software upgradability, as standards change or new features
are added to the communications network;
- Common chipsets can be developed using DSP technology, so
that the same chipset can be used by multiple OEMs, allowing to differentiate
at the software level;
- New applications such as communications in “white spaces”
will rely on agile radios which can change carrier frequency and bandwidth to
utilize gaps in a range of frequencies for short windows of time.
Mr. Hicks feels, “acceptance that SDRs are better is
something that has taken some time. Systems that rely on software, especially
at the leading edge of adoption tend to be less reliable than “instant on
hardware” solutions, so acclimating the customer to the trade-offs is something
that must be accomplished.”
In 2011, the Wireless Innovation Forum released a report
which describes the market for adoption for software defined radio technology.
Over 1.1 billion software defined radios will be shipped during 2011. Roughly
half of mobile handsets, as well as virtually all mobile infrastructure, public
safety radios, military tactical radios and satellite communications utilize
programmable logic in the radio design.
Sources:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/software-defined_radio
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