Software-defined radio (SDR) is a highly flexible communication system that’s capable of configuring the hardware to perform various functions. An SDR’s components are implemented or defined in a programmable medium and provide a flexible link between hardware devices and the software interface.
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a semiconductor device based on a reconfigurable matrix of logic blocks. These devices, when integrated into a SDR, are incredibly powerful and can sustain high data throughput because such systems provide both the input/output bandwidth and the processing capabilities for implementing multi-gigasample sampling rates and gigahertz-range bandwidths.