Product category:
VMEbus Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Mercury Computer Systems | Subject: Echotek Series ECV4-4
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 20 June 2006
Mixed-signal boards see through
electronic clutter
Echotek Series mixed-signal products form a bridge between the realms of analogue signals and digital processing.
Mercury Computer Systems announced its Echotek Series ECV4-4 FPGA-based family of mixed-signal products at the Military Embedded Electronics and Computing Conference (MEECC) in Long Beach, California The Echotek Series leads the mixed-signal products industry in extracting clear signals from electronic clutter
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 30 May 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Echotek Series mixed-signal products form a bridge between the realms of analogue signals and digital processing.
After an analogue signal is received by an antenna or other sensor, it must be digitised and manipulated into a form amenable to signal processing.
The challenge, and the key to successful applications, is to manage this transformation in real time while maintaining the integrity of the original signal.
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"Echotek products have always delivered the finest signal integrity, measured by SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) or SFDR (spur-free dynamic range)", said Gary J Turchetta, General Manager of the Echotek Product Group at Mercury.
"Our new product offerings continue that tradition while adding a huge leap in new FPGA processing capability".
Two of the new Echotek Series ECV4-4 digital receivers can be configured together to enable coherent processing of eight data channels, doubling the channels available for beamforming applications.
Beamforming is a signal processing technique used to control the directionality of the reception or transmission of a signal on a transducer array.
The technique combines the digitised signals from multiple antennae to increase signal amplification in the direction of wanted signals and decrease the amplification of interference and noise.
The ECV4-4 is also the first COTS digital receiver to harness the processing power of seven Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).
Four Virtex-4 SX FPGAs function as channelisers, while two Virtex-4 FX FPGAs operate as cross-channel processors, and a third Virtex-4 FX FPGA is dedicated to board control.
The ECV4-4 family comes in classic 6U VME and 6U VXS form factors, with options for digital receivers and transceivers covering multiple frequency bands.
Dedicated I/O allows two boards to combine data to achieve simultaneous and coherent access to eight individual inputs.
This enables application developers to address a vast problem in signals intelligence (Sigint) and air traffic control radar, in which the challenge is to get wideband data from eight antenna elements to the same place at the same time for beamforming.
The ECV4-4 is sold as a stand-alone module or as part of the Mercury PowerStream series.
PowerStream is a family of fabric-enabled, integrated multicomputers that support DSP processing, FPGA processing, and I/O functionality in CompactPCI, VME, VXS, VPX-REDI and other form factors.
All PowerStream series multicomputers run a common software environment that eases migration between form factors and provides a fast and seamless development path to future system architectures.
The ECV4-4 family of products is available today within standard lead times.
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