Sundance Technology Helps Development Of Portable Mine Detector System

The PHMD system developed by QinetiQ used a pulse induction metal detector combined with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) array to discriminate between minimum metal anti-personnel mines and small metal clutter. The signals were used to provide an easy-to-use audio-visual interface for the operator. A capacitive sensor was added to provide information to aid processing of the radar responses and to provide feedback to the operator of the position of the sensors above the ground.

The GPR used high speed DSP and all-digital MLBS waveform generation with custom 9GHz chips. Data was captured over an LVDS datalink and a serial port for the metal detector. Processing, 3D focusing and anomaly detection was carried out using two of Sundance's SMT365 DSP modules featuring Texas Instruments DSP tightly coupled to a Xilinx Virtex FPGA.

This was an incredibly complex problem to solve and given the operational challenges of mine detection it was critical that the complexity was hidden from the operator, said Flemming Christensen, managing director of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd. By combining a range of high performance and break-through technologies the QinetiQ team made a very significant contribution to improving the speed and accuracy of mine detection and Sundance is proud to have played a part in that.

The light weight SMT365 provides a flexible platform for the next generation of very high demand processing applications such as radar systems, telecom systems, image processing and medical applications. The SMT365 features a 600MHz TMS320C6416 Fixed Point DSP with 4800MIPS peak performance. 8 Mbytes of high speed ZBTRAM @ 133MHz using K7A161801A-QC16, 8Mbytes FLASH ROM for configuration/booting, six ComPorts up to 20Mbytes/s each for InterDSP communications / configuration and two Sundance High-speed Bus (50MHz, 100MHz or 200MHz) ports 32 bits wide. The FPGA is a Xilinx Virtex II device and enables on-the-fly pre-processing of data before transfer to the DSP.

To speed development and reduce overall design time, the SMT365 is supported by the TI's Code Composer Studio and 3L Diamond RTOS.