CP-OFDM PUSCH model-based design for 5G new radio transmitter on ZCU216 RFSoC

5G New Radio (NR) aims to provide a technological solution to the growing demand for faster data rates and lower latency in mobile communications through its improved features and flexibility; however, this comes at the cost of increased design complexity when targeting hardware devices. To address this, high-level design tools such as Simulink can be used with iterative model-based design to shorten development cycles and reduce human error. This paper demonstrates this design flow through the implementation of a hardware-compatible NR Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH) model, targeting the Zynq UltraScale+ Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC) ZCU216 development board. By interfacing with the hardware through MATLAB, the design supports multiple symbol modulation schemes, and parameters such as the number of layers, antenna ports, and selected precoding matrix can be altered. The design was tested by targeting a 10 MHz bandwidth, 60 kHz subcarrier spacing (SCS) waveform with 132 active subcarriers and met timing with 0.276 ns Worst Negative Slack (WNS) for a 245.76 MHz clock frequency, demonstrating its standard compliancy. The Cyclic Prefix Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (CP-OFDM) modulated signal generated on the board was looped back to MATLAB and verified against an existing software implementation, and the hardware usage was recorded.