Looking for help choosing an FPGA kit to be used for wireless 802.11n application

[elcrimer]

Hello,

I need to implement a Wireless (802.11n) firewall as a FPGA application, i am only interested on the frame processing and i don't have neither the intention nor the knowledge to implement the Tx,Rx part.

So basically what i need is an FPGA kit that can handle the trans-receiver part for me, while giving me the ability to process the incoming and outgoing frames, i don't need a "super" kit, just a one that converts a wireless (802.11n) signal to stream of bits that i can work on.

i.e. a kit that would receive and demodulate the incoming signals from a pc or an access point an handles the received stream of bits over to me so i can process and after i do so it will transmit the processed data.


I would be glad if anyone can help me or point me to the right direction.

P.S. i tried to skim over the three major FBGA vendors (Xilinx, Altera and Latticesemi), but all i could find are Ethernet (802.3) networking solutions.

Thank you.

 

[joelby]

I'm not aware of any FPGA development boards that incorporate 802.11n. You might be able to find an FMC card that implements the 802.11n physical layer, but I just did a quick search and couldn't find one.

The cheapest way to do it might be to use a cheap USB 802.11n adaptor in an FPGA development board with USB host ports and use a soft processor such as MicroBlaze and Linux to control the card and receive frames. Rather than passing them through to the standard network layer, you could send them off to an HDL module on the FPGA. Bit convoluted, though.

Another option is to find an 802.11n module and build an interface board that will connect this to an FPGA development board (via an FMC bus, or similar interface on the board of your choice). Yet another option would be to use a mini-PCI module, though I'm not sure I've seen a dev board with a mini-PCI slot.