LPC43xx for Software Defined Radio ?

[lpcware]

Content originally posted in LPCWare by HansWerner on Sat Nov 03 11:50:45 MST 2012
I don't have used any of the ARM Prozessors before.
I have only a principle question.
Is the LPC43xx powerful enough to use it for a Software Defined Radio ?
Instead of using a combination of CPU, DSP and FPGA to use only one LPC43xx.
Does anyone know such a project ?
Does anyone know a board where a LPC43xx is used in such a purpose ?

Thank you

[lpcware]

Content originally posted in LPCWare by HansWerner on Sun Nov 04 12:38:37 MST 2012
Hi Mark,

in the last time I took care of some students, two of them just before their Bachelor certification and a third one after his Diploma certification. (Please apologize my bad english).
I bought some Arduino boards for them so they could do some programming. Because they stayed only a few weeks I choosed the Arduino platform for easy programming. The unsatisfactory thing about the Arduino platform is that there is no debugger so it is not useful for more demanding projects.
In the next time I will get some more students maybe also for doing the Bachelor or Master thesis. While I was thinking about buying some FPGA or DSP boards I got interested in the ARM microcontrollers. Because the Cortex M4 offers some DSP functionality like Multiply-and-Add I asked myself if it would be possible to use the Cortex M4 instead of an DSP.
My first thought was the idea to use the Cortex M4 or an Cortex M4 board for audio applications to programm something like a G.722 audio codec as example.
The second idea is to use a Cortex microcontroller as an encryption and also decryption device. One device is connected via ethernet to an pc and also via ethernet to the internet. At the first step a built in algorithm could be used in the next step some algorithms should be programmed by the students.
And the third idea is to build a software defined radio on base of the LPC43xx. An autonomous radio (not like the GNU radio) would be fine. That radio should be able to transfer an audio data stream (64Kbit/s uncompressed, 0.3-3.4KHz) by a robust modulation like Pi/4-DQPSK. Some form of error correction like a Reed-Solomon-Coder should be possible. Spread spectrum or frequency hopping would be a nice to have but not essential.
At the moment I'm surfing at the internet for microcontrollers, boards, development environments.

I will have a look at that SDR Cube.

[lpcware]

Content originally posted in LPCWare by mark03 on Sat Nov 03 23:08:36 MST 2012
Hans,

Just to give a rough idea, the DSP capability of Cortex-M4 should be considerably greater than that of the Motorola DSP56000, which I (and a lot of other amateur-radio enthusiasts) used to use as a baseband processor back in the 90s.  In other words, feeding it with relatively narrowband I and Q data (perhaps hundreds of kHz max?), an LPC43xx could handle simple modulations like SSB, AM, FSK without any fancy coding, that sort of thing.  If you look up "SDR Cube" on google, you will find a similar project using a dsPIC instead of an ARM, basically a Softrock direct-conversion receiver where the microcontroller has taken the place of the more commonly used PC+soundcard.  It really depends what you mean by "SDR" though.  You're not going to be decoding wifi or bluetooth, that's for sure.