Implementation of OFDM Transceiver on FPGA

Abstract

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation technique which divides the available spectrum into many carriers. OFDM uses the spectrum efficiently compared to FDMA by spacing the channels much closer together and making all carriers orthogonal to one another to prevent interference between the closely spaced carriers. The main advantage of OFDM is its robustness to channel fading in wireless environment. Use of reconfigurable architecture makes the system more flexible to the design requirements. FPGA can be considered as the most efficient reconfigurable architecture in the family. This paper discusses design and implementation of a base band OFDM transmitter and receiver on FPGA hardware. The work includes 64-QAM mapping and de-mapping modules, serial to parallel and parallel to serial converter modules. The design also uses 64-point FFT and IFFT as the main processing modules. All modules are designed using System Generator in MATLAB2010a and implemented on Virtex 5 series of FPGAs.