Steepest Ascent (2007-11)

Title: Rapid development of 4G wireless communication systems

Research Engineer: John O'Sullivan
Sponsor: Steepest Ascent Ltd.
Academic Supervision: Dr Stephan Weiss and Prof Bob Stewart, University of Strathclyde

The standardisation of 4G wireless communication technology, such as UMTS Long Term Evolution, is now well underway. Steepest Ascent is currently working with its customers to bring 4G to realisation by providing design tools to model and implement physical layer functionality.

This project seeks to develop ways to reduce the time-to-market of 4G equipment and devices by developing design tools and IP cores which meet the requirements of the industry. Of particular interest is the concept of DSP synthesis where high level DSP algorithms are automatically synthesised to a hardware design language such as VHDL or Verilog. Although DSP synthesis is not a new concept, existing tools on the market have significant limitations and lack support for 4G physical layer design.

4G wireless systems will utilise advanced signal processing techniques in order to achieve the target levels of spectral efficiency. For example Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), Hybrid ARQ, and multi-antenna techniques are common to all 4G standards. The research engineer on this project shall be required to gain a thorough understanding of these techniques, gain detailed knowledge of the emerging 4G specifications and investigate and develop efficient yet scalable hardware architectures to implement them.

The project shall not be restricted to DSP synthesis techniques and the research engineer shall be encouraged to look at other ways to help reduce the time to market of 4G wireless products.