Baseband Technology ‘Software runs on Silicon’ – and in the case of SDRs today, the competition between approaches and technologies for exponentially increasing baseband processing requirements is proving a fertile ground for innovation, in both conceptual approaches and implementation architectures. | Software Defined Radio Edited by Walter Tuttlebee Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-470-84318-7 Hardback 0-470-84600-3 Electronic Part III Baseband Technology Software runs on Silicon - and in the case of SDRs today the competition between approaches and technologies for exponentially increasing baseband processing requirements is proving a fertile ground for innovation in both conceptual approaches and implementation architectures. Software Defined Radio Edited by Walter Tuttlebee Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Ltd ISBNs 0-470-84318-7 Hardback 0-470-84600-3 Electronic 7 Baseband Processing for SDR David Lunda and Bahram Honaryb HW Communications Ltd. bLancaster University Many technologies require substantial research and development to facilitate the emergence of mature and generic software defined radio architectures as will be evident from a perusal of the contents of this volume or the other literature in the field. Our own chapter focuses upon the broad ranging topic of baseband processing an important and central element of such architectures. Alongside networking of these enhanced capability and flexible systems the radio frequency processing aspects of the physical layer are required to accommodate a flexible range of different frequencies formats and environments. Baseband processing is perhaps one of the most potentially fruitful areas of development anticipated over the next few years - indeed significant progress is already evident. The Role of Baseband Architectures The baseband of any radio system is responsible for digitally transforming raw data streams into the correct format ready for transmission over a known wireless channel. In a transmitter this simply consists of formatting of the data and introduction of any redundancy required to improve reception. At the receiver the information from the radio frequency front end has to be carefully analyzed in order to extract correctly the data which was intended for reception. This .
