Design of Bluetooth baseband controller using FPGA

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a Bluetooth baseband controller. Bluetooth, which is intended to replace the cables connecting portable and/or fixed electronic devices, is a universal short-range radio link via an ad-hoc network and is specifically designed to provide low-cost and robust networking by applying fast frequency hopping and a shaped, binary FM modulation. Our baseband controller is designed in Verilog -hardware description language (HDL) and is implemented into a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The FPGA implementation integrated with Link Manager software was tested with Bluetooth spec version 1.1 and was shown to be fully functional. The controller carried out the baseband protocols and other low-level link routines and supported about a maximal 700 kbps at a 1 Ms/s symbol rate and about a maximal 5 Mbps at a 4 Ms/s symbol rate.