Building a Rhino Harness A Software Defined Radio Toolflow for rapid prototyping upon FPGAs

Abstract

The Rhino Project is a response to the need for Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms for training and research. Presented in this paper is a toolflow for rapidly prototyping SDR applications upon Rhino. This Toolflow allows for end-users to describe their SDR application in a high level manner and then take it through various levels of abstraction, validated at each transition point, with a resulting implementation upon the Rhino FPGA Platform. An example application developed in a matter of months using this Toolflow is shown to be comparable to an industry standard implementation, illustrating the efficacy of the toolflow.