Articles
LTE PHY System Design And Verification
March 24, 2009
Introduction
The third-generation Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), based on Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA), has been deployed all over the world. To ensure that this system remains competitive in the future, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) began a project in November 2004 to define the long-term evolution of UMTS cellular technology. The specifications related to this effort are formally known as the Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access (EUTRA) and Evolved UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-EUTRAN) but are more commonly referred to by the project name LTE. The first version of LTE is documented in Release 8 of the 3GPP specifications.
Rapid evolution of new commercial wireless standards such as 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) poses significant challenges for physical layer baseband design of commercial wireless products. This also creates challenges for Software-Defined Radio (SDR) development, in which a common hardware/software platform may be required to support multiple wireless standards such as LTE and Mobile WiMAX.
Wireless developers are under increasingly demanding schedules to develop products before wireless standards finalize to meet product shipment schedules. This introduces product development risks to the baseband coding/decoding physical layer design.
The physical-layer baseband design cycle often progresses in parallel with a wireless standard which is still rapidly evolving. Thus, algorithm definition is subject to the developer's interpretation of the preliminary standard, which may not yet be complete and may not yet be well-defined. Unfortunately, misinterpreting the wireless standard on the baseband implementation can result in costly time delays in re-working designs and potentially missing critical time-to-market windows.
A new approach is needed to facilitate rapid development and testing of FPGA-based physical-layer coding/decoding implementations for emerging standards such as LTE. This white paper outlines an improved approach to verify FPGA development using independent and configurable reference test vectors.
Click Here To Download:•White Paper: LTE PHY System Design And Verification
