The Northrop Grumman Corp. Space Technology segment in Redondo Beach, Calif., is involved in the research and development of military satellite communications waveforms as it focuses on software communications architecture (SCA) implementations.

The company has selected Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. in Burnaby, British Columbia, for the company’s flexComm SDR-3000 software-defined radio platform to assist in its internal R&D efforts with regard to SCA and SCA-enabled waveforms.

SCA is an open architecture devised by the Department of Defense for its Joint Tactical Radio Systems (JTRS) program.

The SDR-3000 processing platform incorporates not only software and design tools, but also such hardware as Xilinx field programmable gate arrays, IBM and Freescale PowerPC processors, and Texas Instruments digital signal processors. It further employs Wind River’s VxWorks operating system, spectrum’s quicComm hardware abstraction layer, and Harris’ own SCA core framework. For more information, visit www.spectrumsignal.com.