Product category:
VMEbus Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Mercury Computer Systems | Subject: Echotek Series ECV4-RFT
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 06 September 2006
Signal conversion closes in on antennas
Mixed-signal module has novel capability to co-ordinate data streams to and from sets of spatially distributed sensors.
Mercury Computer Systems has announced its new Echotek Series ECV4-RFT wideband remote fibre transceiver, a mixed-signal module with unique capability to co-ordinate data streams to and from sets of spatially distributed sensors Based on COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) technology, this new product combines high-speed A/D and D/A (analogue-to-digital, digital-to-analogue) technology, Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA reconfigurable processors, and fibre I/O, for wideband applications that require a unique blend of powerful remote processing and low-latency data transfer
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 30 May 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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"The ECV4-RFT is designed to be located near antennas, communicating with a signal processing subsystem via fibre-optic connections up to 100 feet long", explained Craig Lund, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Mercury Computer Systems.
"It can provide stand-alone functionality for wideband remote sensor applications, enabling multi-board coherent processing of data streams from widely separated antennas or sensors to support, for example beamforming".
"Telecommunications antenna designers now have new choices for both fixed-base and portable phased-array antennas".
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"The ECV4-RFT also allows remote, fibre optically coupled sampling of high-speed instrumentation signals".
The ECV4-RFT accepts two analogue inputs and produces two analogue outputs.
After conversion to a digital signal, the input data stream moves to a Virtex-4 SX55 FPGA, which can function as a digital receiver or perform preprocessing on the input signal.
The data leaves the receiver FPGA and moves through the controller FPGA to a 12-channel optical transmitter.
The output of this transmitter is a digital IF signal, moving over a fibre-optic connection to a signal processing subsystem up to 30m distant.
The ECV4-RFT supports multiple-board synchronisation.
Output from the signal processing subsystem returns in a similar fashion, over fibre to an optical receiver, then to the control FPGA, a transmitter FPGA, and finally through the D/A convertors and into an antenna as an analogue signal.
An A/D-only version of the product is available for applications that do not need analogue output.
The reconfigurable processing power of the three Xilinx FPGAs enable users to deploy custom algorithms such as down/up conversion or fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), and to achieve high-performance filtering directly on the board.
Users can apply Mercury FPGA infrastructure IP to get a jump start on developing and deploying their specific applications.
The 6U ECV4-RFT board does not need a backplane interface, although it does draw power from the VME connector.
The A/D interfaces operate at up to 1.5Gsample/s at 8bit resolution whereas the D/A interfaces deliver up to 1.2Gsample/s at 14bit resolution.
The ECV4-RFT began shipping to customers in July 2006 and is available with standard lead times.
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