RF Engines has extended the range of its digital down converter technology so that it can now process up to 1GHz of bandwidth (2Gsample/s ADC rate) input and provide a narrower band output. The technology can operate with fixed frequencies and bandwidths or be fully flexible as required, says the company. The converter technology can be used in electronic surveillance in military digital receivers, where a desired signal band can be extracted from a wide slice of the spectrum for further analysis of the signal content. For example, a radar warning receiver can rapidly spot the signal signature of an incoming missile or other threat, and the down converter will extract the specific signal and measure its parameters. In other applications, such as radio telescopes, this approach allows very wide sections of the spectrum to be monitored at one time, in order to acquire weak or hidden signals. The wideband converter core is optimised for size and speed, on a selection of Xilinx and Altera FPGAs. The core can be tuned for the most efficient use of the available resources, claims the company. Options available include fractional re-sampling options for arbitrary output bandwidth selection and the ability to implement the design in either logic-rich or DSP-rich FPGA architectures. The company is researching converter technology designs in 10GHz range to add to its portfolio of DSP IP cores.
