Employing GNU Radio for Robust Testing of the Novel DASH SoC

Abstract

Through the patronage of the The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Domain-Specific System-on-Chip (DSSoC) program, we constructed the Domain-focused Advanced Software-reconfigurable Heterogeneous (DASH) system-on-chip (SoC), a coarse-scale heterogeneous SoC that breaks the trade-off in computational efficiency versus ease of reprogamability. The DASH SoC caters to the target domains of sophisticated RF processing for communications, radar, positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and spectral situational awareness. We also developed an FPGA-based DASH emulation platform to showcase the capabilities of the DASH SoC and aid in rapid testing and validation. In this paper, we use GNU Radio to rapidly test and validate the functionality of the DASH SoC’s custom Forward error correction (FEC) accelerators with real data. We generate a realistic communications transmit chain with LDPC encoding in GNU Radio, and then feed the resulting output into the DASH SoC emulation framework to perform LDPC decoding via the FEC accelerator. We will show the results of the LDPC decoder, and showcase the functionality of the DASH SoC. Through GNU Radio, we are able to develop realistic communications transmit chains that scale up in complexity with great ease, enabling us to rapidly and robustly test the DASH SoC.