Traditional wireless sensor network architectures are based
on low-power microcontrollers and highly integrated short range radio
transceiver chips operating in one of the few ISM bands. This combination
provides a convenient and proven approach to design and build
inexpensive sensor nodes rapidly. However, the black box nature of these
radio chips severely limit experimentation and research with novel and innovative
technologies in the wireless infrastructure. Our team previously
proposed a revolutionary architecture for wireless nodes based on Flash
FPGA devices. This paper shows the rst results of our work through
the implementation and evaluation of a simple baseband FSK modem
in the SmartFusion FPGA fabric. We also demonstrate how we could
leverage existing software radio projects to use the baseband modem in
a wide range of radio frequency bands.