Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) Development and Teaching PlatformThe computer engineering technology program has a very robust course sequence in digital andembedded systems design with a strong emphasis on hands-on experience for the students. Thestudents in our program are currently being exposed to digital design using hardware descriptionlanguages (HDL) such as VHDL, as well as software and firmware code design using high-levellanguages such as C and C++.One industry trend is to use Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) as hardware verificationplatforms for digital communications systems and digital signal processing systems. Thesesystems will most likely are targeted to an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) due totheir final cost under volume production.Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique that is not new,but the technology required for its implementation has evolved over the last ten years to make itsimplementation feasible. Nowadays a large number of communication standards (e.g. IEEE802.16e (WiMax), 3GPP LTE, DVB-H, 802.11a and 802.11n) have adopted this modulationtechnique due to its performance advantage over other communication techniques.The heart of the OFDM modulation technique lies in the use of the Fast Fourier Transform(FFT), which is a very structured algorithm to convert a time domain signal into the frequencydomain and by taking the inverse FFT can be transformed back to the time domain. Theapproach in OFDM systems is to have digital information modulated by traditionally a phasemodulation technique such as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). This modulationprocess maps a series of bits into symbols. The number of used symbols for each OFDM frame istraditionally a power of two. Then the inverse FFT is performed on the frame to convert it backinto a time domain representation that can be further sent through the transmitter chain andthrough the antenna. On the receiver side the process is reversed and the QAM symbols ...