Technical Issues

Discussion Board for technical issues

Overview

The idea is to have baseband on Blackfin board and add a daughter card for RF module. For the initial implementation we can have it connected to host (OS with applications & drivers) on linux box via an USB or ethernet cable. Later move the OS Apps and Drivers to another ARM board and configure the Blackfin board only to use DSP and daughter card and connected to the ARM board via a peripheral interface. This would be configuraiton for the Alpha phase.

There are lots of issues and doubts which need to be clarified. Lots of hardware related doubts should be answered.

Development Issues

Integration Issues

• Will it be possible to configure the Blackfin board to use only DSP and daughter card?

Rajiv: Yes. All my research points to that we can use the DSP with the RF daughter card as our baseband. For an example I would point to the GNURadio. They also have a similar setup with a FPGA based baseaband and RF daughterboards connected to a high end Linux PC through the USB cable. The only differentiator between GNURadio and us is that we are specfically targeting a GSM baseband whereas the GNURadio hardware is an SDR based solution.

• How to integrate blackfinn module with ARM board? USB/Ethernet is not the answer. The DSP should be in control of ARM.

Rajiv: In the Alpha release it would be eventually connected through a peripheral interface bus.

• Is our design optimal to give us the results we need? How to validate our hardware design?

Rajiv: On paper it does look fine. There will be lots of issues during implementations as it happens in any project. But I am confident that we can resolve all of them.

• If we need to have open source / new community for GSM which we try moot then if we make changes to hardware (like adding custom solutions) then this hardware won't be available easily hampering the development/testing of our boards across the community?

Rajiv: For the community we can still have our prototype setup as the preferred testing mechanism. A linux box connected to the Blackfin through a USB cable. The RF daughtercard is actually a project on the Blackfin STAMP site. Anyone interested in testing/contribution will have to procure the board and the daughtercard, connect it to a linux PC, download the software and it should start working. The only gap is a SIM Card Reader. We can use a OTS commercial solution for that. If anybody wants to go beyond that then they can also use the same configuration as we do (ARM + Blackfin STAMP). That will be our supported solution.