| 7 | 7 | The main board in the platform is the FPGA board. At the heart of this design is a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA. This family of FPGAs is very well suited for the kinds of DSP-intensive operations required by wireless algorithms. For example, the FPGA provides dedicated multipliers, hardware blocks which implement efficient and fast multiplication, a critical operation in signal processing designs. The FPGAs also provide flexible and fast interconnect options for interfacing peripherals and creating multi-processor systems, two primary requirements of the platform design. The Virtex-II Pro also includes embedded PowerPC processor cores, providing an ideal resource for implementing higher layer algorithms better suited for general purpose processors than programmable logic. |
