FPGA Software Radio Solutions for Defense and Wireless Applications

 “This technology has revolutionized how engineers are developing radar and other Mil-Aero applications, and delivering these first working solutions to the market is big news,” said Rodger Hosking, vice president and co-founder, Pentek. He added, “Our modular Quartz board architecture with its unique, deployable QuartzXM eXpress Module, leverages the powerful resources of the RFSoC chip and offers the industry’s fastest path for system development. Adding Pentek’s Navigator tools and example IP for DRFM, radar, high-performance data acquisition, and streaming gigabit I/O delivers a successful application that’s ready to deploy.”

“We are pleased to see the RFSoC device used in the market via Pentek’s Quartz board-level solutions. Measuring only 2.5 by 4 inches, the QuartzXM Model 6001 includes all of the circuitry needed to maximize the performance of this device. The Model 6001 can be housed on the Pentek 3U VPX Model 5950 or it can be deployed on a custom carrier. This flexibility offered has been well received as users can deploy this new technology in the field in a very small footprint, which is critical to Mil-Aero market needs,” said David Gamba, Xilinx senior director for the Aerospace and Defense Vertical Market.

The Quartz Architecture Difference

The Pentek Quartz architecture embodies a streamlined approach to FPGA boards, simplifying the design to reduce power and cost, while still providing some of the highest performance FPGA resources available today. Designed to work with Pentek’s Navigator Design Suite tools, the combination of Quartz and Navigator offers users an efficient path to developing and deploying FPGA software and IP for data and signal processing.

The Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC chip integrates eight RF-class A/D and D/A converters into the Zynq FPGA fabric and quad ARM Cortex-A53 and dual ARM Cortex-R5 processors, creating a multichannel data conversion and processing solution on a single chip.