How to design a scalable OFDMA engine for WiMAX

By Lawrence Rigby, Altera Corporation
March 13, 2007 -- dspdesignline.com

WiMAX is fast gaining traction in the competitive world of broadband wireless access technology with many analysts acknowledging that it has significant market potential.

Scalable orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) is a key technology behind mobile WiMAX—as it is with other wireless technologies. OFDMA is also expected to play a key role 3GPP and 3GPP2 long term evolution standards.

To achieve competitive systems, however, designers and OEMs must choose a silicon platform that offers flexibility, scalability and a risk-free cost-reduction path. This is particularly true of an OFDMA engine because of its high performance requirements.

The scalable OFDMA engine should possess the following features:

Support for 128, 512, 1K, and 2K FFT sizes to address variable bandwidths from 1.25 to 20 MHz
Support for both downlink partial usage of subchannels (PUSC) and full usage of subchannels (FUSC) and uplink PUSC mandatory schemes
Support for both fixed and variable pilots and runtime configurable cyclic prefix insertion
Highly parameterizable design
Optimized for efficient use of FPGA device resources

Click here to read more ...