Tagged: desktopsdr

FPGAs for DSP and Software-Defined Radio: Short Course at UCLA

The University of California, Los Angeles is hosting a 3-day hands on short course on using SDR’s like the RTL-SDR with FPGA hardware and MATLAB Simulink. This is a course with a high knowledge pre-requisite, so you will likely need qualifications and/or knowledge equivalent to a bachelors in Electrical/Computer Engineering to be able to understand the material. It is mainly intended for DSP and Communications Engineers, HDL designers, FPGAs engineers, RF engineers, and systems engineers. The course runs for 3 days between 10 – 12 October. The main blurb of the course is described below:

One of the main aims of this course is to demonstrate the workflow required to take floating point Simulink receivers (such as the ones presented in the book) and target them onto SDR hardware. This means converting to fixed point, generating HDL code, and then packaging it into something that can be deployed to ZynqSDR hardware.

In this short course we will present, review, simulate then implement real-time DSP enabled software defined radios (SDR) on laptops, Raspberry Pis, Xilinx (Zynq) SoC FPGAs with RF transceivers. The design, simulation and implementation will take the form of a complete model based design work-flow from within MathWork’s MATLAB and Simulink software tools. The course will ensure attendees are educated in key relevant multi-rate DSP algorithms and techniques, in communications modulation methods, quadrature/QAM transceiver designs, and timing and synchronisation. The first part of the course will educate on DSP and communications, followed by a second part on FPGA systems implementation (focussing on Xilinx Zynq SoC) and introduce MathWorks Embedded and HDL Coder methods for hardware targeting. In the third and final part of the course we will develop real-time ‘desktop’ implementations of SDR transceivers using a model based design flow. We will start with floating point designs, which will evolve to fixed point, and then undergo final code generation stages with the Embedded and HDL Coder packages prior to FPGA deployment..

All attendees on the course will use (and take home!) an RTL-SDR device (which tunes from 25MHz to 1.75GHz) and have access to a Raspberry Pi and Zynq SDR kits in class hosting the RTL-SDR device and a wideband FMComms RF card respectively. The class format will be 40% lecture, 20% live SDR demonstration and 40% hands-on ‘desptop SDR’ using software and SDR hardware. 

This course is related to the desktopsdr.com text book which was released September 2015. The physical copy of the book can be purchased on Amazon, or downloaded for free in pdf form on their desktopsdr.com website.

Download the book at desktopsdr.com
Download the book at desktopsdr.com

DesktopSDR MATLAB RTL-SDR Text Book Released

Back in August we posted about an RTL-SDR related text book called DesktopSDR that was due to be released later in the month. The text book discusses technical SDR topics, with the RTL-SDR used as the radio receiver and MATLAB used as the digital signal processing tool. It looks to be very useful to students of radio or communications engineering. There were a few delays with the release, but it is now out at www.desktopsdr.com. The eBook version is free whilst the print version is soon to be released on Amazon for about $68 USD for the paperback and $89 USD for the hard back

To go along with the book they have also released several accompanying videos that are available at desktopsdr.com/videos.

The books blurb reads:

The availability of the RTL-SDR device for less than $20 brings software defined radio (SDR) to the home and work desktops of EE students, professional engineers and the maker community. The RTL-SDR can be used to acquire and sample RF (radio frequency) signals transmitted in the frequency range 25MHz to 1.75GHz, and the MATLAB and Simulink environment can be used to develop receivers using first principles DSP (digital signal processing) algorithms. Signals that the RTL-SDR hardware can receive include: FM radio, UHF band signals, ISM signals, GSM, 3G and LTE mobile radio, GPS and satellite signals, and any that the reader can (legally) transmit of course! In this book we introduce readers to SDR methods by viewing and analysing downconverted RF signals in the time and frequency domains, and then provide extensive DSP enabled SDR design exercises which the reader can learn from. The hands-on SDR design examples begin with simple AM and FM receivers, and move on to the more challenging aspects of PHY layer DSP, where receive filter chains, real-time channelisers, and advanced concepts such as carrier synchronisers, digital PLL designs and QPSK timing and phase synchronisers are implemented. In the book we will also show how the RTL-SDR can be used with SDR transmitters to develop complete communication systems, capable of transmitting payloads such as simple text strings, images and audio across the lab desktop.

Download the book at desktopsdr.com
Download the book at desktopsdr.com