by John McHale
CHESAPEAKE, Va. — Officials at EDO Corp. recently chose digital signal processor (DSP) technology from Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. in Burnaby, British Columbia, for a ship-based signal intelligence system called the Active Low Frequency Code Array Sonar or ALOFTS.
The ALOFTS system is integrated into international naval defense systems to provide intelligence on the location of submarines and torpedoes. Spectrum engineers will provide flexComm signal processing engines for deployment in the high availability, high reliability ALOFTS, Spectrum officials say.
"Our next generation of systems provides signal processing capabilities in a Linux-based CompactPCI platform," says Charles Lundrigan, manager of system design at EDO in Chesapeake, Va. "We chose Spectrum's flexComm technology because of its industry-leading signal processing technology, off-the-shelf availability, high processing performance, and open-standards architecture. Not only was Spectrum able to provide us with the enabling technology in a short time frame, but also an exceptional level of technical and customer support."
EDO will be using Spectrum's Barcelona HS (hot swap) CompactPCI DSP boards for ALOFTS, says Manuel Uhm, senior manager of strategic marketing at Spectrum. The 6U board uses quad Texas Instruments TMS320C6701 DSPs and runs at 167 MHz, he adds. The boards are part of Spectrum's flexComm wireless family of signal processing products, Uhm says.
Barcelona-HS combines all the necessary multiprocessor DSP hardware and software tools to begin development for high availability systems, Spectrum officials say. The board comes equipped with either four TMS320C6201 fixed-point DSP processors, or four TMS320C6701 floating-point DSP processors from Texas Instruments.
The DSPs use TI's high-performance VelociTI VLIW architecture, which includes 32 general-purpose 32-bit registers, 6 arithmetic logic units, and two 16-bit multipliers, which generate a 32-bit result. The Barcelona-HS board provides more than twice the inter-processor communications bandwidth of traditional architectures when combined with Spectrum's Hurricane PCI bridge ASIC in a distributed shared memory architecture, Spectrum officials claim.
The Barcelona board is for high-availability applications such as satellite earth stations, signal monitoring, surveillance, tactical radio systems, and cellular base stations, Spectrum officials say.
EDO experts chose the Spectrum DSP products directly off the shelf, Uhm says. EDO is also the first customer of Spectrum's Linux-based CompactPCI product, he adds.
Uhm says he believes the Linux-based product will become very popular because Linux is an open source operating system and it is inexpensive.
For more information about flexComm, and Spectrum Signal Processing contact Manuel Uhm by phone at 604-421-5422, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.spectrumsignal.com. For more information on EDO contact the company by phone at 212-726-2000 or on the World Wide Web at http://www.edocorp.com.
