SDR Forum Transceiver Facility Specification Tutorial - Eric Nicollet, Thales Communications

The purpose of this tutorial will be to present the Transceiver Facility Specification being under development within the SDR Forum. This specification aims to provide a openly available reference (the Facility) containing generic requirements applicable to a very large of Transceiver sub-systems (I/Q base band to RF and vice-versa stage). This in support of two essential SDR industrial use cases: (i) development of highly portable Waveform Applications software, thanks to the total abstraction of the implementation the Facility is bringing, (ii) development of efficient multi-waveforms compliant flexible Transceiver Sub-system. The proposed approach of the Transceiver is translating into reference API specification which ideally complement any implementation architecture, proprietary or standard-based solutions (such as VITA 49, OBSAI, CPRI od DigRF designs), thus opening the way to dramatic cost-efficiency increases in the physical layer development area. The tutorial will exhibit a general presentation of the specification, from the industrial drivers to a accurate overview of the technical content, as well as a report on readiness in front of the Forum's objective to have one first increment of the specification released by Q1 2009.