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Design Plan - Research Phase
Part 1 - August 2009 -> December 2009
Description
During the first part of the design plan, we researched communications topics for our project. Most of us already had a little bit of experience with communications--but only in the analog domain, not the digital. During this phase, we decided to go with the 8-PAM mapping for our project, and made many other decisions that were needed to begin our design.
We also tried to make contact with our sponsor, Wulfsburg. However, we had little success in doing so (we would later find out that this was because Wulfsburg was undergoing a major reorganization as a company). This somewhat hindered our ability to moved forward smoothly, as we had to make educated guesses about what the sponsor wanted.
Milestones Reached
- Complete model of our product in Matlab.
- General idea of the needed requirements for this project.
- Obtained several parts needed for our project, including the Altera DE2 test board.
Key Design Decisions
- The FPGA chip choice (Cyclone 2). Chosen because of its availability to us.
- Decision to go with 8-PAM mapping. This was chosen primarily because of the group members familiarity with this type of modulation.
Tools Used
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