wiki:OFDMReferenceDesign/Extending

Extending the WARP OFDM Reference Design

The OFDM Reference Design is intended to serve as a starting point for wireless research projects. The design is open-source at all layers- the OFDM PHY, supporting peripherals, WARPMAC code and example application code. Any aspect of the design can be customized to build novel wireless applications.

The Reference Design is distributed as a project for Xilinx Platform Studio. This XPS project integrates the hardware and software components of the design. You will need to be comfortable with XPS to customize this design. Our tutorials and workshop materials are a good starting point if you're new to XPS.

Building the XPS Project

In order to modify the XPS project, you will need to re-build the hardware design on your PC. Unfortunately, this is required even if you don't make any hardware changes (XPS is not very good about creating portable projects). After re-building the hardware, you can iterate on software changes quickly. The hardware build usually lasts around 60 minutes on a fast (2x3GHz) machine with lots (4GB) of RAM. It will take considerably longer on slow/low memory machines.

Linker Script

After building the project locally, you will need to generate a linker script for each software project you wish to use. In XPS, choose Software->Generate Linker Script. We recommend assigning your code and data sections to internal memory. This allows programming the node with just the download.bit file without using a bootloader. The heap and stack can safely be assigned to external memory.

To use just the internal memory for code and data, make sure your script settings match those shown below.

It is critical that no code sections be assigned to the memory block xps_bram_if_cntlr_2. This memory block is used for packet buffers. The PHY writes to this memory directly and will corrupt any code/data written there by software.

Last modified 14 years ago Last modified on Sep 26, 2009, 11:34:24 PM