Upper Saddle River, N.J. — Pentek, Inc. has introduced a family of rugged software radio modules with two of Pentek's GateFlow FPGA IP cores installed on its recently introduced Model 7141 dual-channel, 125-MHz, 14-bit A/D and 500-MHz 16-bit D/A transceiver. The 7141-420 and 7141-430, the first modules in this new family, transform the Model 7141 into two highly integrated products that address a wide range of applications. In addition, because the IP cores are pre-installed, the end user is completely free from any FPGA development tasks.
The 7141-420 FPGA installed core with dual wideband digital downconverter (DDC) and interpolation extends the bandwidth range of both the digital upconverters (DUCs) and DDCs from very narrow to very wide. Comapared to the previous DDC decimation range of 32 to 16,384 without the core, the decimation now extends from 2 (for bandwidths up to 50 MHz) to 1,048,576 (for audio bandwidths).
In addition, the interpolation range of the DUC extends from 2 to 32,768 versus 2 to16 without the core. As a result, the 7141-420 can handle signals from 40 MHz to 2.44 kHz, matching the range of the receive-signal bandwidths. The 7141-420 is best suited for general-purpose transceiver functions such as military-radio and signal intelligence transceivers where engineers need to transmit and receive in a very flexible arrangement of different bandwidths and frequencies for a limited number of channels.
The 7141-430 FPGA installed core with 256 channels of narrowband DDC provides a large number of relatively narrowband channels. In addition, the 7141-430 is said to be far more physically dense than any competitive product currently on the market. For example, two 7141-430 modules support 512 receive channels in a single 6U VME or cPCI slot.
Each module digitizes a 60-MHz bandwidth using either of the two 125-MHz A/Ds. The DDC core supports independent tuning of each channel across that bandwidth for downconversion of up to 256 different frequencies. Each signal is translated to baseband and then lowpass filtered and decimated to a user selectable bandwidth. The decimation is programmable from 1024 to 9984, covering many popular communication standards.
The 7141-430 can be used in applications such as commercial and military wireless systems with a large number of frequency-division multiplexed channels. It is suitable for the receive side of communication base stations and for signal-intelligence surveillance, where the objective is to capture, process and review data in a particular military or commercial frequency band.
These modules are also available in a variety of form factors including PCI, 3U and 6U cPCI, as well as a conduction-cooled PMC version to handle rugged applications. Linux and VxWorks drivers are available for the 7141-420. Windows drivers are available for the 7141-430, and Linux drivers will be available in the future.
Pricing: Starts at $12,995 for the Model 7141-420 and $11,995 for the Model 7141-430.
Availability: Delivery is 8 to 10 weeks ARO.
Product information: 7141-420 and 7141-430
Pentek, Inc., www.pentek.com
