It is a little unusual to describe a hardware radio on a website that focuses on software radios. But I was impressed with the functionality and performance of AT86RF215 transceivers by Microchip during my experiments. I have used them for node localization and they can be put to many other good uses, including, …. here is the surprise, …. as software defined radios. Through a little programming effort, I/Q samples from the digital frontend can be directly accessed using which you can run your own baseband on a digital signal processor. Although interfacing with an external device for I/Q samples
Continue readingDSP and the Humand Mind
It is relatively straightforward to establish the power and potential of human organs. The results are deterministic and not much different than animals. For example, my arm or leg can move only within a certain range and perform a limited number of known tasks. On the other hand, the possibilities with the mind are unlimited. For example, it can plan and execute a drilling mission to dig tunnels in the moons Titan and Europa, all the while sitting here on planet earth! We can say that the mind is the most mysterious organ not only in the human body but
Continue readingCoordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CoRDiC)
Digitial Signal Processing (DSP) plays a crucial role in algorithm implmentation for building digital and wireless communication systems. A common theme in all those algorithms is that they can be implemented with the following simple operations: addition multiplication shift In fact, these are the basic principles on which a digital signal processor is constructed. However, when it comes to implementation of real-time systems in hardware such as FPGAs, we find ways to reduce the complexity even further. Which operation (out of the above three) do you think is the most demanding in computations? It is the multiplications. Therefore, it is
Continue readingUnderstanding Space-Time Codes: Alamouti Scheme
In major cellular and wireless networks today, space diversity is employed with the help of multiple Tx antennas and/or multiple Rx antennas giving rise to Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems. There are three different modes in which multiple antennas can be deployed: Beamforming Spatial Multiplexing Space-Time Coding In this article, we discuss space-time coding that achieves Tx diversity through multiple antennas at the Tx and simple linear processing at the Rx. This simplicity made this technique quite suitable for the past generations of cellular and other infrastructure based networks. There are two main kinds of space-time codes: Space-Time Block
Continue readingMaximum Likelihood Estimation of Clock Offset
When I started my PhD, one of the first papers I read was On Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Clock Offset by Daniel Jeske [1] from University of California, Riverside. It eventually set the direction of my future research and ultimately my PhD dissertation. I found this paper quite interesting as it talked about the estimation of clock phase offset. Later I went on to explore what was missing here (the clock frequency offset) and more. Keep in mind that carrier phase estimation is a different problem that has already been discussed in the past here, here and here. Most of
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