Product category:
Design Services
News Release from: RF Engines
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 11 April 2006
Australian military sign up for filter
designs
RF Engines has been awarded a contract by Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), for the provision of high performance digital filter designs.
RF Engines has been awarded a contract by Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), for the provision of high performance digital filter designs The designs, which form a key role in an advanced receiver systemsi, build on RF Engines' existing portfolio of signal processing intellectual property (IP), and deliver high quality filtering of wideband signals in real time
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 21 Sep 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
PFT core processes video 20 times faster than DSP
RF Engines has created a new way of simultaneously processing digital signals across a wide spectrum in real time.
Speedy complex FFT core fits on million-gate FPGA
RF Engines (RFEL) has released details of its first product in its vectis family of multi-radix-architecture pipelined complex FFT cores.
RF Engines will provide DSTO with two filter designs, each based on frequency domain filtering techniques using the polyphase DFT.
The first design will support a continuous complex sample rate of 200MHz with 512 frequency domain weights, whereas the second design will support complex samples rates over 150MHz with 4096 weights.
The filter shapes are fully reprogrammable, and can be changed while the filter is running without loss of data.
Further reading
Filter is reconfigurable RF spectrum channeliser
RF Engines (RFEL) has developed a radical new patented filter bank design, called the Tuneable Pipelined Frequency Transform (TPFT).
Transform simplifies software-defined radio
This week at the International Signal Processing Conference RF Engines will formally release its Tuneable Pipelined Frequency Transform.
Both designs are targeted at the Altera EP1S80 FPGA, a relatively small device for the level of performance being achieved.
"We are delighted that DSTO have selected RF Engines' signal processing technology for this leading edge development", said John Summers, RF Engines' CEO.
"It is a further example of our system design capabilities, and shows how we are able to provide rapid and cost-effective solutions to the most demanding signal processing challenges".
Frequency domain techniques permit efficient implementation of traditional FIR filter functionality and are based on an analysis stage to convert the incoming signal to the frequency domain, and a synthesis stage to convert back to the time domain.
The actual filtering process takes place in the frequency domain where it can be performed very efficiently.
The analysis-synthesis "pair" is typically implemented with a fast Fourier transform (FFT) and an inverse FFT.
However, for this contract, RF Engines will be using the polyphase DFT, which can be considered as a superior replacement to the FFT since it provides far greater frequency isolation between frequency bins for the same transform length.
This feature is particularly useful in a filter design, as it allows efficient implementation of very sharp transition bands, and hence greater filter performance for a given silicon resource budget.
For comparative purposes, the polyphase filter design with 4096 frequency domain weights will provide performance equivalent to a FIR filter with 16K taps.
At the sample rates required by DSTO, this is well beyond the scope of a single FPGA implementation if attempted with traditional time domain convolution techniques.
This work follows on from an initial study phase, in which RF Engines was contracted by DSTO to investigate the feasibility of the filter implementation, and to produce bit-true Matlab models of the filters.
"We find that producing accurate simulation models is a crucial step in our design flow, since it allows customers to test out the design prior to the implementation stage, dramatically reducing any risk", added Summers.
• RF Engines: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Electronicstalk email newsletter
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
