Markets for high-speed A/D converters are significant in size and many are growing rapidly. Commercial users include wireless mobile communication systems, airline radar, air traffic control towers, ship communications, and wireless networks. Industrial uses include medical imaging systems and process control systems. Government is another significant user: military radar, global military radio networks, unmanned aerial vehicles, and intelligence gathering systems.

FPGAs are truly an integral part of the latest generation of software radio products. Not only are they being used with traditional digital signal processing algorithms but also in the management of data acquisition, buffering, triggering and timing aspects of high-performance real time systems.

One area clearly supported by OpenVPX is a DoD-specific Quick Reaction Capability (QRC), where the development and deployment cycles demanded by the market are significantly reduced to achieve critical program needs.

Government programs are putting the squeeze on prime contractors to develop more war fighting capability faster. Consequently, the primes are calling for open standards and the end of proprietary architectures to help them meet these challenging requirements within shorter and shorter timeframes.

When VXS, a proposal for standardizing gigabit serial switched fabrics shook the embedded community in 2002 as part of the VMEbus renaissance, XMC, a natural extension of that technology to PMC modules was inevitable. VXS is the popular name for a switched serial backplane fabric implementation for VMEbus. The VXS specification is fabric-transparent, in that there are subspecifications, one for each of fabrics: Infiniband, Serial RapidIO, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express.

Software Defined Radio (SDR) has revolutionized electronic systems for a variety of applications including communications, data acquisition and signal processing. The inner workings of the SDR will be explored with an in-depth description of the internal structure and the devices used. Finally, some actual board- and system-level implementations and available off-the-shelf SDR products for embedded systems will be described.

Dr. Ian Dunn, Chief Technology Officer, Advanced Computing Solutions at Mercury Computer Systems, shares his company’s perspective on OpenVPX.

FPGAs are becoming an increasingly important resource for software radio systems.

The inner workings of the digital receiver are explored and actual digital receiver systems and commercially available products are described.

A look at combining the DRS SI-9146 Dual Tuner and the VMETRO Phoenix VPF1 VXS DSP engine illustrates a low-risk SIGINT and EW development approach.