Devices Specifically Designed for Sophisticated EW Applications
Abaco Systems has been contracted by a major defence systems integrator to provide PC821 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) cards and FMC120 FPGA mezzanine cards for subsystems that will provide the processing capability required to scan, analyse and action SATCOM data transmissions for the US Air Force, the company announced on 19 August.
The customer had a number of stringent selection criteria for the FPGA processing solution. It had to be based on PCIe architecture and offer flexibility in terms of FPGA choice. The requirement was for a single vendor complete board-set solution to support four analogue-to-digital (A/D) and four digital-to-analogue (D/A) channels at 16-bit resolution. Most importantly, it should be capable of straightforward transition from the PCIe-based proof-of-concept stage to rugged deployment in a 3U VPX system – meaning that the chosen vendor would need to offer common BSPs across multiple architectures.
“Abaco offers one of the broadest ranges of FPGA, DSP and RFSoC platforms in the industry that are specifically designed for the demands of sophisticated electronic warfare applications for deployment in the harshest environments,” stated John Muller, Chief Growth Officer at Abaco Systems. “They are also built using industry standards – such as PCI and 3U VPX – to provide the flexibility and interoperability our customers need, and can make a significant contribution to eliminating the time and expense involved in in-house development.”
The PC821 is a high-performance, PCI Express card with advanced DSP capabilities and multiple I/O options. It supports one VITA 57.4-compliant FMC+ and one VITA 57.1 compliant HPC FMC site. Both FMC sites are closely coupled to the Xilinx Virtex or Kintex UltraScale FPGA and a DDR4-2133 SDRAM SO-DIMM. The PC821’s PCIe Gen3 interface can support up to eight lanes and the card features a single-lane SFP+ module as a serial peripheral interface. An 8-lane 14Gbps FireFly connector is also available as an optional serial peripheral interface. The FireFly connection can be made accessible either from inside the chassis or, alternatively, from the bezel if the SPF + cage is removed. The PC821 is designed for high-performance applications that require large-band signal digitisation or generation through the use of accelerated frequency domain algorithms.
The FMC120 provides four 16-bit A/D channels up to 1Gsps, four 16-bit D/A channels up to 1.25Gsps and up to 2.8Gsps sample rate with interpolation. The devices can function up to 1Gsps during simultaneously D/A and A/D operation as the clock source is shared. The design is based on Texas Instruments‘ ADS54J60 A/D and DAC39J84 D/A converters. The sample clock can be supplied externally through a coax connection or supplied by an internal clock source (optionally locked to an external reference). Additionally, a trigger input is available for customized synchronisation.
