GE Fanuc teams with PrismTech to demonstrate compact COTS software-defined radio
DENVER, 7 Nov. 2007.GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms in Charlottesville, Va., and PrismTech Corp. in Burlington, Mass., are joining hands to present a compact software-defined radio (SDR) demonstrator based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software.
The demonstration, this week at the Software Defined Radio Forum Technical Conference and Product Exposition in Denver, receives a standard FM broadcast radio signal, translates the signal to base band, and demodulates it, which allows the signal to be monitored. The signal then remodulates, shifts to an RF frequency, retransmits either as an AM or FM signal.
"The demonstration is designed to show how a COTS platform can deliver a solution to a requirement that many customers have," says Jonathan Jones, sensor processing technology leader at GE Fanuc.
"In certain frequency bands, the spectrum is becoming so crowded that existing communications equipment is encountering a high degree of interference," Jones says. "Rather than obsolete the equipment, customers want to use the capability we are showing to translate the frequency to a different, less crowded, band for retransmission -- and then do the reverse operation at the receiving end."
A key feature of the demonstration "is that it not only implements SDR compliance with the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) -- a key emerging standard that facilitates waveform and application portability across platforms -- but that it does so using only COTS hardware and software," says Steve Jennis, senior vice president of corporate development of PrismTech.
The hardware platform for the demonstration features the GE Fanuc rugged PMC571 digital transceiver module, mounted on a rugged 3U CompactPCI IMP1A single board computer, operating under the VxWorks real-time operating system and housed in a conduction-cooled enclosure. The PMC571 provides radio frequency analog/digital signal conversion, FPGA-based digital signal processing including digital down conversion, digital up-conversion and digital/analog conversion.
PrismTech's software platform for the demonstration features the Spectra 2 OE (operating environment) and MDE (model-driven engineering) tool kit. Spectra 2 provides a complete SDR OE and tools solution and is a recognized leader in enabling waveform portability and hardware independence -- across GPP, DSP and FPGA processor architectures.
For more information contact PrismTech online at www.prismtech.com, or GE Fanuc at www.gefanuc.com.
