International conference on Communication and Signal Processing, April 3-5, 2013, India

FPGA Implémentation of Digital Modulation

Techniques
Faiza Quadri,ArunaD.Tete

Abstract— This paper presents the review of the different digital Traditionally gate arrays contained a number of building
modulation techniques and the various methods and tools that blocks or primitive cell. The FPGA is similar in structure to
are used to implement it on FPGA along with the design gate arrays the difference is that they have programmable
summary and logic utilization of the resources. It includes an
elements. In case of Altera device the programmable cell is
approach for the implementation of three modulatorsmainly
Amplitude Shift Keying modulator, Phase Shift Keying called Logic Element (LE) and in Xilinx devices it is
modulators and Frequency Shift Keying modulator in VHDL by Configurable Logic Block (CLB). VHDL and Verilog HDL
means of Xilinx 13.1and simulation in Modelsim .The same are the hardware description language, which is a common
modulators has also been developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK language for designers. This is the high level language and
environment. The various factors that affect the choice of a simulation, synthesis tools are available. It allows adaptable
particular modulation technique have also been discussed and design reconfiguration and multiple level of abstraction.
accordingly anyone of the techniques can be adopted taking into A VHDL specification can be accomplished in order to attain
consideration the application. high level satisfaction in its correctness before starting a
design. Through support for top down design and logic
Index Terms—Amplitude Shift Keying, Phase Shift Keying,
synthesis, VHDL allows technology independent design .A
Frequency Shift Keying, FPGA VHDL design consists of a Block Module which defines the
interface and function of the design. The input and output logic
signals of the circuit are defined in the interface. The function
I. INTRODUCTION describes the internal operation of the design. There are
Modern communication system makes use of the digital various other functional blocks which may be required to build
communication techniques mainly because of the development the design elements of the logic circuit are included in these
in the field of VLSI and DSP. It is more cost effective and has blocks.
advantages like noise immunity, resistivity to the impairments
of channels, error detection and correction, encryption,
multiplexing of video, sound and data, security, source coding
,equalization. The particular digital modulation techniques
should provide low signal to noise ratio, low bit rate, occupy a
minimum bandwidth, cost effective and easy to implement.
In electronics and telecommunications, modulation is the
method of varying one or more parameters of a high-frequency
periodic waveform, called the carrier signal, with information Fig 1. Design implementation in FPGA
bit stream to be transmitted called a modulating signal.
II. FPGA IMPLEMENTATION The typical FPGA design flow begins with design entry using
Schematics or a hardware description language (HDL), such as
The FPGA and VHDL combination is a prevailing tool for Verilog HDL or VHDL. By subsequent steps, the digital
realizing sophisticated systems and cost effective design circuit can be created which then can be implemented inside
schemes. the FPGA. The proceeding steps include compilation,
FPGA is chosen to realize digital modulation techniques simulation, programming, and verification in the FPGA
because they can implement a broad range of logic gates. hardware. Verilog is a language which allows switch-level
modeling which is useful for exploring new circuits.

Miss Faiza Quadri is with the Department of Electronics Engineering,

G.H.Raisoni College of Engineering, NAGPUR, (India) – 440016;e-mail:
([email protected]).
Prof.ArunaD.Tete is Assistant Professor in the Department of
Electronics Engineering, G.H.Raisoni College of Engineering, NAGPUR,
(India) – 440016;e-mail:( aruna.mathurkar @gmail.com).

978-1-4673-4866-9/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE

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 block. The demodulated signal is fed to the Decoder which
helps to retrieve the data back in its original form, thus
reproducing the information that was transmitted from the
transmitter.

Fig 2. Design flow in FPGA

III. DIGITAL MODULATION

Modulation is the process which facilitates the transfer of

information over a medium i.e digital data between two or
more nodes. In radio communications modulation is carried
by adjusting a physical characteristic of a sinusoidal carrier, it
may either be the frequency, phase, amplitude or a
combination thereof. This process is carried out by a
modulator at the transmitting end which impose the physical
Fig. 4.Modulation process.
change to the carrier and a demodulator at the receiving end to
recover the information on reception.
Modulation Techniques can be broadly classified as follows:

1. Digital and Analog Modulation

2. Baseband and Bandpass (Passband) Modulation
3. Binary and M-ary Modulation
4. Memoryless Modulation and Modulation with
memory
5. Linear and Nonlinear Modulation
6. Constant envelope and Non-constant envelope
Modulation
7. Power efficient and Bandwidth efficient
Modulation[10]

Fig. 3. Digital modulation system

The block diagram is show in the fig.1.The information to be

transferred is the digital input to the transmitter; it is then
encoded for the particular parameters for the channel
transmission. The encoded output is then fed to the modulator
which converts the low-frequency signal to a higher frequency
range for efficient transmission. By using higher frequency
range size of the antenna can be reduces. The modulated signal Fig. 5.Types of Digital modulation techniques
thus produced is transmitted through the channel to the
receiver end.
At the receiver end the reverse process occurs. The modulated
signal from the carrier is demodulated by the demodulator

Common digital modulation schemes can be classified as:

1. Amplitude Shift Keying (BASK)
2. Frequency Shift Keying (BFSK)
3. Phase Shift Keying (BPSK)

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 used in Advanced Digital Design (ECE 444).Such an approach
IV. PAST WORK ON DIGITAL MODULATION. in a digital communications course could be beneficial to
students for exhibiting and strengthening the theoretical
principles to the pragmatic aspects of digital processing in a
S.O. Popescu, A.S.Gontean and G.Budura[1] have purposed a modern communications environment.
BPSK system design which in terms of signal power the
BPSK modulation and demodulation represents an important S.O. Popescu, A.S.Gontean and G.Budura [5],have proposed
modulation technique. The BPSK system was simulated using two approaches for the implementation of the BPSK
Matlab/ Simulink environment and System Generator, a tool Modulator in the Matlab/Simulink environment, the first is
from Xilinx for FPGA design also it was implemented on two with simple blocks where the carrier, the modulating and the
Spartan 3E Starter Kit boards one for the modulator other for modulated signals were generated external, second with a
the demodulator. block in which Matlab code was written and the carrier signal
is generated external, but the modulating signal was generated
Y. H. Chye1, M. F. Ain2, Norzihan M. Zawawi3 [2],designed internal by a LFSR and third scheme with a System Generator
and implemented BPSK transmitter using field programmable where all three signals were generated internal except the
gate array (FPGA) for digital signal processing (DSP), and modulating signal which can be produced either internal by
expansion P240 Analog Module for digital-to-analog (D/A) the LFSR, or external by the pulse generator.
conversion. Thesoftware defined radio (SDR) provides a re- BPSK modulator has implemented on the Spartan 3E Starter
configurable, high performance, and efficient platform to Kit based on the third approach in system generator.it also
integrate all these individual functions of BPSK transmitter, aims at future expansion of the project by including the
which is different from the sophisticated implementation of implementation of the BPSK system with the modulator and
binary phase shift keying (BPSK) transmitter where demodulator, besides the performance of the system will be
application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), mixer, and local evaluated by introduction of AWGN (Additive White
oscillator (LO) for carrier signal were used. The period of Gaussian Noise).
carrier sinusoidal signal was designed as one cycle per bit for
5 Mbps input bit. The DSP-based BPSK transmitter was C. Erdoğan, I. Myderrizi, and S. Minaei,[6], presented a Field-
developed and compiled to Verilog HDL (Hardware programmable gate-array (FPGA) implementations of binary
Description Language) netlist. D/A converter (DAC) was amplitude-shift keying (BASK), binary frequency shift keying
interfaced with FPGA using a HDL module of configurations (BFSK), and binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) digital
of P240 Analog Module and the HDL netlist is integrated with modulators for educational purposes in a digital
clock synthesizer of BPSK transmitter. The integrated design communication course. This architecture makes use of
is implemented into Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA MB development minimum number of blocks. And was compatible with the
board with DAC. existing Altera Development and Education (DE2) FPGA
board. The input carrier and the modulating signals are
Kangshun Li 1,2,3, Xiaoqiao Lu1, Wensheng Zhang3, Feng controllable for the frequencies of the signal. The digital
Wang [3], proposed the design model of digital modulator by modulators were designed in Verilog Hardware Description
using the improved Direct Digital Synthesizer (DDS) Language (HDL) netlist, and were later implemented into an
technology through running the Matlab/DSP Builder Altera DE2 FPGA board.and was simulated using the Quartus
environment. Using the improved DDS technology, helps in II simulation software.
overcoming the shortcomings of the traditional method and
also reduce a lot of errors and save a lot of hardware
resources, which was further implemented and simulated in
VHDL and Modelsim respectively. The correctness and V. DESIGN METHODOLOGIES
validity of the model was verified in Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) chip.
The design which produces the different kinds of the digital The three modulation techniques in a single system can
signal modulation was simple with minimum system resources provide a structure that can be used according to the
and improved reliability and flexibility that have an additional requirements and the environment of the particular
advantage in modulated signal device along with practicability application.Themost common approache for the realization of
and usefulness. the modulation techniques is by means of
MATLAB/SIMULINK environment or system generator, and
FaruqueAhamed, and Frank A. Scarpino[4]simulated and then it can be converted into VHDL or Verilog for the
implemented a BPSK demodulation system on FPGA, by synthesis and ultimately implemented in FPGA.
using the Verilog hardware description language and Altera The ASK system including the modulator and the demodulator
10-k FPGA device design tools for implementation was used is shown in fig. .The system includes two input signals
along with the simulation software.This describes the design namely the carrier signal and the information signal to be
and simulation of a BPSK correlation detector.Here the modulated. The output of such a system is the demodulated
students can design and simulate, an ROM module, a signed information signal at the receiver.
digital (Booth) multiplier, PN sequence generator, an
accumulator. It has been suggested that this project can also be

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 The results for the ASK and PSK modulation are given by Fig
where according to the input signal the carrier is modulated.

Fig 6.input signal

Fig 11.PSK modulated signal.

Fig 7.ASK Modulated signal.

Fig 8.Input signal.

Fig 12.FSK modulated signal.

V. FACTORS AFFECTING THE CHOICE OF DIGITAL

Fig 9.PSK Modulated signal. MODULATION TECHNIQUE.

Another way is to program the system in VHDL directly. The Depending on the application and the environment the specific
modulators for the ASK, FSK and PSK can be programmed digital modulation can be selected from the available. The
using VHDL and eventually be implemented in FPGA. The digital modulation technique should also be power efficient
system thus will contain the modulator which will modulate i.e. it should be able to preserve the originality of the message
the signal at the transmitter side, and then the signal will travel even at low power level. In order to reduce the noise effect the
through the channel to the receiver where the original signal power is increased .Thus depending on the level of
information signal can be retrieved by using the corresponding fidelity the particular type of modulation is employed.
demodulation technique. The modulated output for ASK,PSK Digital modulation should be bandwidth efficient i.eit should
and FSK developed in Xilinx 13.1 and simulated using accommodate the data within the limited range of frequency.
Modelsim is shown in fig.10, fig.11and fig.12 resp. Hence bandwidth efficiency is the measure of how the
bandwidth allocation is utilized for a modulation scheme
Thus designing a modulator may lead to compromise between
bandwidth and power efficiency
There are other factors also that help to choose the particular
modulation technique. For instance, the telephone system
serves a large user so the cost and complexity should be
minimum and the digital modulation technique should be
simple. Apart from this the performance of the modulator and
demodulator in an environment of interference is a major
issue. The digital modulation technique used for the particular
surrounding should be such that it is sensitive to time jitter,
fading and multipath time dispersion of the channel. [10]
Fig 10.ASK modulated signal.

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 VI. CONCLUSIONS

Digital Modulation provides more information capacity,

compatibility with digital data services, higher data security,
better quality communications, and quicker system
availability.
Digital modulation schemes have greater capacity to convey
large amounts of information than analog modulation
schemes.

The commonly used approach for the FPGA implementation

of the different modulation techniques is by the conversion of
the program from a particular tool to VHDL for the further
processing. Here a direct method is introduced where the three
techniques are programmed in VHDL and then implemented
in FPGA.
Thus, the different digital modulation techniques can be used
for the different applications in modern day communication
system.
With the advancements in the field of VLSI and DSP an
efficient and reliable communication system can be employed
by the various methods and tools discussed in the paper for
research as well as educational purpose.

REFERENCES

[1] S.O. Popescu, A.S.Gontean and G.Budura, “BPSK System on

Spartan 3E FPGA” in 10th IEEE Jubilee International Symposium
on Applied Machine Intelligence and Informatics January 26-28,
2012

[2] Y.H.Chye, M.F.Ain, N.M.Zawawi, “Design of BPSK Transmitter

Using FPGA with DAC”, in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE 9th
Malaysia Conference on Communications, Malaysia, 2009.

[3] Kangshun Li 1,2,3, Xiaoqiao Lu1, Wensheng Zhang3, Feng Wang,

“Design and Implement of Digital Modulator Based on Improved
DDS Technology and DSP Builder” in 2009.
[4] F.Ahamed, A.Scorpino, “An educational digital communications
project using FPGAs to implement a BPSK Detector”, IEEE
Transactions on Education, Vol.48, No.1, 2005.
[5] S.O. Popescu, A.S.Gontean and G.Budura,”Simulation and
Implementation of a BPSK Modulator on FPGA” in 6th IEEE
International Symposium on Applied Computational Intelligence
and Informatics May 19–21, 2011
[6] C. Erdoğan, I. Myderrizi, and S. Minaei, “FPGA Implementation
of BASK-BFSK-BPSK Digital Modulators” in IEEE Antennas and
Propagation Magazine, Vol. 54, No. 2, April 2012.
[7] W.Song, J.Zhang, Q.Yao, “Design and Implementation of BPSK
Modulator and Demodulator on Modern DSP Technology”, 3rd
IEEE International Symposium on Microwave, Antenna,
Propagation and EMC Technologies for Wireless
Communications, China, 2009,
[8] Agilent Digital Modulation in Communications Systems —An
Introduction
[9] “Introduction to digital modulation schemes” geoff Smithson
[10] Modulation and demodulation Techniques in communication
systems Dr. Oke c. Ugweje Department of electrical & computer
engineering The university of akron Akron,
[11] “Performance Evaluation of M-ary Frequency Shift Keying Radio
Modems via Measurements and Simulations” Submitted by ERIC
NII OTORKUNOR SACKEY Department of Electrical
Engineering Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden
September 2006

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