Speaker
Description
The AMD RFSoC (Radio Frequency System on Chip) architecture has gained significant attention within the Software Defined Radio (SDR) community for its integration of Radio Frequency (RF) frontend, FPGA fabric and Linux-capable Arm-based processing system. Despite its accessibility to researchers via the RFSoC2x2 and RFSoC4x2 development board platforms, its adoption within the GNU Radio community has been limited. This work demonstrates the potential of combining RFSoC with GNU Radio. We aim to enable wider use of RFSoC in the GNU Radio community by targeting a reference system to the low-cost RFSoC4x2 board, which comes with open-source full-stack software. This paper presents a novel design that leverages the Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) network interface to establish an up-to-100GBit/s bi-directional data link between GNU Radio, running on a personal computer (PC), and the RFSoC4x2 for arbitrary radio signal transmission and reception. Due to the high speed RF-ADCs (5 GSPS) and RF-DACs (9.85 GSPS) found on the RFSoC platform, a QSFP network interface is necessary to facilitate transmission of signals generated off-board. We have developed a small library of reusable, PYNQ-based GNU Radio Out of Tree (OOT) modules that allow interfacing with the FPGA fabric, RF ADCs and DACs. Using the remote procedure calls we are able to control the Tx/Rx centre frequency and RFSoCs Digital Up/Down Converter (DUC/DDC) rates from the host PC to achieve runtime configurable bandwidth. Additional signal inspection and visualisation is implemented using existing GNU Radio GUI widgets and analysis blocks.
| Talk Length | 15 Minutes |
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