As a complete software radio system for connection to HF or IF ports of a communications system, Pentek, Inc. has released a dual multiband transceiver with FPGA. It joins Pentek's family of high-performance PMC/XMC transceiver modules. The model 7141 is an enhanced successor to 7140 transceiver, which is widely deployed by many customers for SIGINT, software radio and communications applications. According to Pentek, it has significantly boosted analog performance in the new model so that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) are improved by 10 dB, when compared to many competitive products.

Model 7141 accepts two full-scale analog HF or IF inputs on front-panel MMCX connectors at +10 dBm into 50 Ohms with transformer coupling into Linear Technology’s LTC2255 14-bit 125 MHz analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). The ADC output samples are delivered into the Virtex-II Pro FPGA for signal processing or for routing to other module resources. A TI/Graychip GC4016 quad digital downconverter accepts either four 14-bit inputs or three 16-bit digital inputs from the FPGA, which determines the source of GC4016 input data. These sources include the ADC converters, FPGA signal processing engines, SDRAM delay memory and data sources on the PCI bus. Each GC4016 channel may be set for independent tuning frequency and bandwidth. For an ADC sample clock frequency of 100 MHz, the output bandwidth for each channel ranges from 5 kHz up to 2.5 MHz. By combining two or four channels, output bandwidth of up to 5 or 10 MHz can be achieved.

A TI DAC5686 digital upconverter (DUC) and dual digital-to-analog converter (DAC) accepts baseband real or complex data streams from the FPGA with signal bandwidths up to 40 MHz. When operating as an upconverter, it interpolates and translates real or complex baseband input signals to any IF center frequency between DC and 160 MHz. It delivers real or quadrature (I+Q) analog outputs through two 320 MHz, 16-bit DAC converters to two front-panel MMCX connectors at +4 dBm into 50 Ohms.

If translation is disabled, the DAC5686 acts as a two channel interpolating 16-bit DAC with output sampling rates up to 500 MHz. The optional factory-installed interpolation filter core 450 increases the sampling rate of real or complex baseband signals by a factor of 16 to 2048, programmable in steps of 4, and relieves the host processor from performing upsampling tasks. The interpolation filter can be used in series with the DUC’s built-in interpolation, creating an overall interpolation range for the module from x2 to x32,768.

The Xilinx XC2VP50 Virtex-II Pro FPGA serves as a control and status engine with data and programming interfaces to each of the on-board resources including the ADC converters, GC4016 digital downconverter, digital upconverter and DAC converters. Factory installed FPGA functions include data multiplexing, channel selection, data packing, gating, triggering and SDRAM memory control. The FPGA includes two PowerPC cores that can be used as local microcontrollers to create complete application engines.

Two independent internal timing buses can provide either a single clock or two different clock rates for the input and output signals. Each model 7141 can act as either a timing bus slave receiving timing signals or as a master driving up to seven boards supporting synchronous sampling and sync functions across all connected boards. Up to 80 boards may be synchronized with model 9190 clock and sync generator.

Model 7141’s optional XMC connection complies with the VITA 42 XMC specification and supports high-speed switched-fabric interconnects such as serial RapidIO and PCI Express. Dual 4X links between the XMC module and the carrier board handle serial-bit rates up to 3.125 GHz. These links operate independently of the PCI interface and achieve streaming data transfer rates of up to 2.5 GB/sec.

The Model 7141 is fully supported by Pentek's ReadyFlow board support packages (BSP). ReadyFlow BSPs and software development tools, plus third-party offerings are all available for a variety of operating systems including Windows 2000/XP, Linux and VxWorks platforms.

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