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

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