openwifi

There are some opensource LTE UE stacks, for example srsRAN has one. Legalities aside, it can in theory connect to a public network using an USB sim card reader (or a software sim emulator if you know the required keys). For a stationary node you should get more or less the same performance as good LTE dongle, but dynamic applications will perform very bad. Unlike WiFi, LTE allows quite high latencies, so the host computer can do all computations, no real need for FPGA code. For WiFi you have OpenWiFi: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi It currently has 11ac support and WiFi6E is in development. Operation on 2.4GHz can be a bit confusing due to lack of 11b support but on 5 or 6GHz it 'just works' (though note lack of DFS support).

We do even further. If we use openwifi as a router in home, it can fuzz the CSI and destroy those sensing method: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi/blob/master/doc/app_not...

Also > It should be noted that many WiFi routers, such as TP-Link AC1750, come with 3 antennas, so our method only requires 2 of these routers. > WiFi-based perception is based on the Channel-state-information (CSI) that represents the ratio between the transmitted signal wave and the received signal wave. The CSIs are complex decimal sequences that do not have spatial correspondence to spatial locations AFAIK, access to raw CSI data is not available on consumer routers. You need specific FPGA/SDR boards which happens to speak the WIFI 2.4G/5G protocol. There are some open sources efforts such as https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27133079 : https://ans.unibs.it/projects/csi-murder/ enabled by https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi Both partially funded by EU's Horizon2020 program. Openwifi talk at FOSDEM 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q5nHUWP43U

Well, the question was: can you do analog designs? Designing your own transistors, not relying on logic gates library. That's what full custom means. That opens the door to less conventional stuff, such as CMOS imagers, memories, RF/Analog designs, etc. Obviously the available space and I/O are going to be limitting factors. Regarding Wi-Fi, I was thinking of some of the RF frontend for a project such as [1]. I am not extremely knowledgeable about RF, so that would be a learning opportunity. I imagine it to be mostly carrier generation and multiplexing, the higher layers are doable on an off-the-shelf FPGA. That said, Wi-Fi is a simple target, but maybe not the most interesting one. That's the first full-custom application example I thought of. [1]: https://github.com/open-sdr/openwifi