Design and Implementation of an OFDM modem in FPGA for WLAN/WPAN

Wireless Networks OFDM has established it's way in the future generations (beyond 3G) of wireless communications by being adopted in recent WLAN PHY layer standards such as IEEE 802.11a and HiperLAN/2. In the future, WLAN will play a significant role along with WPAN, and naturally OFDM is expected to be a key technology in providing high data rate multimedia services. An OFDM modem based on IEEE 802.11a PHY standard is designed using Celoxcia's Handel-C based DK1 design environment. The design is implemented in FPGA. The modem consists of a 16-QAM modulator and an IFFT module on the transmission side and an FFT module and a demodulator on the receiver side. The software-like hardware design tool provides a rapid design development, with little knowledge on FPGA logic structure. A carefully designed pipelined OFDM modem is developed in this project. The design is optimized in speed and space. The OFDM modem can be used as the baseline for an OFDM based (and/or Hybrid OFDM based) multicarrier modulation testbed for future WPAN/WLAN systems. (Muhammad Imadur Rahman, Martijn Kuipers, Flemmimg B. Frederiksen)