Application-ready platform for wideband data links and SATCOM processing

Mercury Computer Systems Inc. in Chelmsford, Mass., announced its application-ready platform for wideband data links and satellite communications (WBDLS) processing. The integrated commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) platform includes the Mercury Echotek Series ECV4-RFT 6U wideband remote fiber transceiver, which combines high-speed A-D and D-A technology, Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA reconfigurable processing, and fiber I/O. This board brings the benefits of COTS to applications such as 274-megabits-per-second data links that require a blend of wideband I/O from dual 1.5-gigabit-per-second 8-bit A-D converters and dual 1.2-gigabit-per-second 14-bit D-A converters. The onboard FPGA reconfigurable processing resources bring digital processing capabilities closer to the sensor (typically an antenna), and enable multiboard coherent processing in distributed systems. The integrated solution includes Mercury’s Component Portability Infrastructure (CPI), which provides a prevalidated platform to interface the FPGA waveform application with a high-performance switch fabric, onboard memory, communications, system command and control, and I/O. CPI’s non- proprietary Open Core Protocol (OCP)-based interfaces act as a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) to increase the portability of FPGA applications. CPI also provides software modules necessary to seamlessly integrate the infrastructure to any SCA v2.2+ compliant Core Framework. For more information contact Mercury online at www.mc.com.