Quantification and round influence on FPGA implemented algorithms for an OFDM radio interface

OFDM is widely used as the physical radio layer in an increasingly high number of standards due to its ability to manage time and frequency SNR variations on the radio channels. First described by Chang in 1966, the high digital processing resources required for its implementation have delayed its commercialization until the 1990s. In order to speed up the algorithms implementations for real time transmission, the fixed point implementation is needed (based on ASIC, FPGA or DSP). As a drawback, fixed point implementation leads to quantification and round errors that needs to be taken into consideration in the algorithm design.