By Courtney E. Howard
BURLINGTON, Mass. - Engineers at PrismTech of Burlington, Mass., and Gumstix Inc. in Portola Valley, Calif., have unveiled the first commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software-communications-architecture (SCA) software-defined-radio (SDR) solution on a miniature computer, bringing size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) benefits to SDR developers.
PrismTech’s Spectra SCA-compliant, COTS-based software is installed on Gumstix open-source Linux miniature computers. The Spectra software combines an SCA 2.2.2-compliant core, CORBA middleware that meets SCA requirements, CORBA Object Services, and an XML parser.
The Spectra software, one-megabyte in size, runs on several radio platforms and operating systems, such as Integrity from Green Hills Software in Santa Barbara, Calif.; LynxOS from LynuxWorks in San Jose, Calif.; Linux from MonetaVista Software in Santa Clara, Calif.; Linux from Red Hat in Raleigh, N.C.; VLX from VirtualLogix in Montigny-le-Bretonneux, France; and VxWorks from Wind River Systems in Alameda, Calif.