By Ron Wilson, Editor-in-Chief, Altera Corporation
Software-defined radio (SDR) is by now a grizzled veteran in the dusty waiting room of next big things. Apart from some deployments in battlefield radios, electronic countermeasures, and small-cell cellular base stations, it remains a great idea awaiting its chance at the big time. But advances in radio-frequency (RF) semiconductors and in computational accelerators are poised to dramatically lower the cost of SDR hardware, simplify the software part of the equation, and consequently open new applications at lower price points. These opportunities range from the current next big thing—the Internet of Things (IoT)—to low-cost reconfigurable radios for developing countries, to open platforms for hobbyists. The advances are targeting key cost points in SDR architectures. One way to organize their discussion is to examine the elements most SDR implementations have in common, and to see how technology change is impacting them.
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