PMC/XMC Transceiver Module is Ideal for Wideband Radar Countermeasures and MIL/COTS Applications

“As for technology, the Model 7158 offers Pentek's highest combination of A/D sampling rate and resolution, and fulfills a direct need expressed by our customers,” noted Rodger Hosking, vice president of Pentek. Customers are not only interested in this product as a system component, they are also interested in fully-integrated solutions such as recording systems capable of digitizing and recording signals at 500 MHz Msamples/sec in real-time. What's more, the dual, on-board Virtex-5 FPGAs add a wealth of DSP resources and are a perfect match to these higher-rate A/Ds to handle real-time signal processing, he added.

The 7158 high-speed transceiver is well suited for both deployed and lab environments. Some deployed environments include UAVs, ships and aircraft. By coupling the high speed analog I/O data converters through powerful FPGA resources, this module can receive a signal, process it and send it back out in real time. It delivers exceptional performance for radar countermeasure applications that require complex, but extremely low-latency, signal processing.

In such an application, the signal processing FPGA of the 7158 handles the real-time DSP algorithms while the second FPGA provides a status and control path to the PC or carrier board. Additionally, the FPGA can be a Xilinx FXT family device with a PowerPC processor, forming a complete, self-contained subsystem. Users can install an Ethernet stack so the module can communicate over gigabit Ethernet to external systems in the vehicle or craft.

Using Pentek’s GateFlow FPGA Design Kit, customers can develop and integrate custom IP to support a wide range of real-time applications for communication, signal intelligence, beamforming and radar countermeasures.

The dual FPGA architecture of the 7158 delivers tremendous processing power with the necessary flexibility to extend the FPGA resources. Both on-board FPGAs are members of Xilinx’s Virtex-5 family so that customers can choose specific FPGA devices for each to fulfill particular requirements. Available FPGAs include LXT devices with generous logic resources and SXT devices with an abundance of DSP resources for signal processing.

A total of 512 MB of DDR2 SDRAM memory arranged in two banks enables users to capture real-time data, storing it in a local memory. This feature will have particular appeal to those engaged in wideband radar where the destination device cannot handle the peak real-time data rates and the SDRAM acts as an elastic buffer.

The SDRAM can also be used to store an arbitrary waveform for playback through the D/A converters. Optionally, the total SDRAM capacity can be doubled to 1 GB.

The 7158 is supported with the ReadyFlow Board Support Package (BSP) under Windows, Linux and VxWorks operating systems (OS). Each BSP includes an OS driver as well as a full feature ReadyFlow C language library to support all board functions and provide sample applications for quick development startup.

This module is also available as a PCI module, Model 7658; as a 3U and 6U cPCI module, Model 7258 and 7358 respectively; and as a PCI Express module full- and half-length versions with the Models 7758 and 7858.