Trade Study of Implementation of Software Defined Radio (SDR): Fundamental Limitations and Future Prospects
Abstract
Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology is commonly advocated for waveform and frequency-agile radios. It works well for simple signals and limited bandwidths, less so for complex broadband waveforms. Whether these difficulties reflect theoretical limits or design choices was unknown since few quantified limits exist. Using literature surveys and analysis this report explores fundamental limits to SDR bandwidth and waveform complexity, design trade-offs, closeness of current technology to these limits, and future trends. For fixed front ends, SDR bandwidth is limited by analog-to-digital converter (ADC) bandwidth, dynamic range, and aperture jitter. The last dominates ADC fabrication limitations and GSM-like dynamic range for 2.5 GHz digitized bandwidths is theoretically impossible - not a fabrication limitation. Flexible front-ends are important as 2nd-order products limit practical instantaneous bandwidth to less than an octave. Increasing parallelism should improve processor performance until 2025, reaching a limit of 15 nanowatts per million multiply-and-accumulate operations per second. Multicore processors will alleviate latency.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 09, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA491778
Entities
People
- Charles W. Bostian
- Feng Ge
- J. R. Nealy
- James Neel
- Jeffrey H. Reed
- Julia Mays