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Software defined radios can be implemented on general purpose processors (CPUs), e.g. based on a PC. A processor offers high flexibility: It can not only be used to process the data samples, but also to control receiver functions, display a waterfall or run demodulation software. However, processors can only handle signals of limited bandwidth due to their comparatively low processing speed. For signals of high bandwidth the SDR algorithms have to be implemented as custom designed digital circuits on an FPGA chip. An FPGA provides a very high processing speed, but also lacks flexibility and user interfaces. Recently the FPGA manufacturer Xilinx has
introduced a hybrid system on chip called Zynq, that combines both approaches. It features a dual ARM Cortex-A9 processor and an FPGA, that offer the flexibility of a processor with the processing speed of an FPGA on a single chip. The Zynq is therefore very interesting for use in SDRs. In this paper the
application of the Zynq and its evaluation board (Zedboard) will be discussed. As an example, a direct sampling receiver has been implemented on the Zedboard using a high-speed 16 bit ADC with 250 Msps.
Hardware prototyping is an essential part in the hardware design flow. Furthermore, hardware prototyping usually relies on system-level design and hardware-in-the-loop simulations in order to develop, test and evaluate intellectual property cores. One common task in this process consist on interfacing cores with different port specifications. Data width conversion is used to overcome this issue. This work presents two open source hardware cores compliant with AXI4-Stream bus protocol, where each core performs upsizing/downsizing data width conversion.