FPGAs are truly an integral part of the latest generation of software radio products. Not only are they being used with traditional digital signal processing algorithms but also in the management of data acquisition, buffering, triggering and timing aspects of high-performance real time systems.

When VXS, a proposal for standardizing gigabit serial switched fabrics shook the embedded community in 2002 as part of the VMEbus renaissance, XMC, a natural extension of that technology to PMC modules was inevitable. VXS is the popular name for a switched serial backplane fabric implementation for VMEbus. The VXS specification is fabric-transparent, in that there are subspecifications, one for each of fabrics: Infiniband, Serial RapidIO, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) has revolutionized electronic systems for a variety of applications including communications, data acquisition and signal processing. The inner workings of the SDR will be explored with an in-depth description of the internal structure and the devices used. Finally, some actual board- and system-level implementations and available off-the-shelf SDR products for embedded systems will be described.

This article describes the implementation of a common DSP[] application, Spectrum Analysis, on the COTS WILDSTAR II for VME FPGA[]-based processing board with a 1.5 GHz A/D I/O card, using the CoreFire FPGA Design Suite.