chanem is a high-bandwidth channel emulator for observing the effects of Doppler shifting on an input signal.
This project constituted my master’s thesis for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. It was conducted as part of the MIT VI-A co-op program with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, for which it received The J. Francis Reintjes Excellence in 6-A Industrial Practice Award.
chanem was a full-stack project, in that its construction involved
- creation of a high-speed digital interface to control an ADC/DAC daughter card,
- design, simulation, and implementation of high-speed DSP algorithms on an FPGA,
- implementation of complex state-full control logic with a soft-processor, and
- construction of a software framework to interface with an input stream (such as a flight simulator), calculate Doppler shift commands, and send them to the FPGA
In addition, during construction of chanem, a number of infrastructure tools were built to aid the development process, such as
- a build system to wrap around the Xilinx toolchain,
- a method for preprocessing VHDL inputs,
- a high-level assembly language and compiler that produces Picoblaze assembly code, and
- a Python framework for plotting simulated and captured spectral data to a format suitable for print