Software radio transceiver with 256-channel downconverter

Pentek Inc. in Upper Saddle River, N.J., is blending the GateFlow 4954-430 high-density, narrowband digital downconverter (DDC) FPGA IP core with the 7140 software radio transceiver PMC module. The resulting new 7140-430 Software Radio Transceiver uses the core, implemented in a Xilinx FPGA, to provide 256 individually tunable receive channels in a full-function PMC/XMC transceiver module. This combination is ideal for developers of multichannel communication systems, such as military radios and commercial wireless base stations, which require a high channel density within tight size, weight, cost, and power constraints. The 7140 module’s front end accepts two analog HF inputs and transformer-couples them into 14-bit A/D converters sampling up to 105 MHz. The digitized output signals pass to a Virtex-II Pro XC2VP50 FPGA that implements the downconverter core sourced from either channel. A channelizer stage generates 1024 fixed, adjacent, over-lapping frequency channels with alias-free performance greater than 75 dB. A 256-output switch matrix follows the channelizer, providing the coarse tuning function. In addition to coarse tuning, each channel uses its own oscillator (NCO) to provide fine-tuning and a mixer to translate the signal of interest to baseband. For more information contact Pentek online at www.pentek.com.