High speed Gardner algorithm

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Abstract

This document present parameters the design of a serial and a parallel architecture for time synchronization of the BPSK, QPSK and 8PSK signals of the DVB-S2 standard. The architecture is able to work at low ratio Es/No (Ratio between the energy per transmitted symbol and single sided noise power). The Gardner algorithm is used to calculate the timing error. The recovery time synchronization is performed using a Nyquist filter (Square-Root Raised Cosine filter) and an interpolation filter, these two filters are combined in a single filter to reduce the number of multiplications and additions.

The serial architecture processes one symbol per clock cycle, whereas that the parallel architecture processes four symbols per clock cycle; each symbol is represented only by two samples. The communication system is assume to have stable emission clock and a receiver clock with a precision of 5 ppm (standard deviation of the variation of the number of clock cycles per million) and 50 ppm, with the clock frequency of the receiver slightly higher than the clock frequency of the transceiver.

The BER curve is presented to show the performance of these architectures with fixed point simulation in MATLAB. The VHDL code of these architectures is simulated with ModelSim with the same input source as in MATLAB.

The designed architecture has been implemented with a Xilinx XC6VLX240T-1FF1156 FPGA chip, and reaches the maximum running frequency of 280 MHz. Thus, the architecture sustains a symbol rate of 1.12 G symbol/s (i.e. from 1.12 Gbit/s for BPSK up to 6.72 Gbit/s when 64 APSK signal is used). Performance are characterized for several roll-off of the Nyquist filter: 0.01 up to 0.35. As an illustration, Fig. 1 compare the Bit Error Performance (BER) as a function of $E_s/N_0$ between theory and actual design. In this figure, the receiver clock is supposed to be 50 ppm (part per million) faster than the transmission clock.

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Figure 1: BER performance of the proposed algorithm.

As can be seen in this figure, the proposed algorithm reach almost optimal performance for a very large range of $E_s/N_0$ (from -10 dB to 15 dB), and for several constellation (BPSK up to 64 APSK).

This work has been done between INICTEL-UNI and the Lab-STICC. Hardware used in this project has been funded by the project PALMYRE II (Brittany region and FEDER funding).

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Photos of hardware test

Here is two photos of the hardware testbed of the FPGA. VHDL is synthesized on a ALTERA STRATIC3: reference input and output files are generated by the reference software model. Data generator and digital oscilloscope allow to feed the hardware design and to retrieve the output. Identity between hardware output and software reference model validates the hardware design.

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Figure 2: FPGA Board with connectors.

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Figure 3: Whole hardware test system.

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More information

Technical information about the design is available here. If you need more information, please, send directly an email at emmanuel.boutillon@univ-ubs.fr

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Related papers

  1. No paper are published so far on that topic.
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