COLUMBIA, Md., 2 March 2007. The Government Communications Systems Division of Harris Corporation has issued a contract to Spectrum Signal Processing (USA) Inc., a subsidiary of Spectrum Signal Processing Inc., for its flexComm SDR-4000 rugged software defined radio (SDR) solution to be deployed in field trials of the U.S. Navy's multimission unmanned surface vehicles (MMUSVs).
Under the agreement, Spectrum will supply the signal processing system onboard the MMUSV that communicates with a processing system aboard a littoral combat ship.
The MMUSV, a mission module able to launch from a littoral combat ship, is designed to operate autonomously and, as a result, protect boat operators from threats and attacks, including extreme environmental conditions and hazardous electromagnetic attack.
The MMUSV can be configured to support several different types of missions such as side scanning sonar data collection, weapons missions, anti-submarine warfare, or surface ship warfare. Each of these missions will require a different type of data to be collected and communicated to the littoral combat ship. Spectrum's SDR-4000 will be used to enable the transmission of these different data types.
"The software-defined nature of the SDR-4000 provides flexibility in how different types of data can be transmitted. This flexibility, combined with the low power and small form factor design of the SDR-4000, makes it an ideal solution for this complex application," says Ken Schumacher, senior program manager, Harris Corporation Government Communications Systems Division.
Spectrum's SDR-4000 is a 3U CompactPCI subsystem that is comprised of two major component-level hardware products: the PRO-4600 SDR modem processing engine and the XMC-3321 dual transceiver input/output mezzanine card. RapidIO provides a high bandwidth interconnect fabric between these cards, as well as the input/output functionality. Software development tools include Spectrum's quicComm hardware abstraction layer, which facilitates algorithm partitioning and programming, and a real-time operating system. The SDR-4000 can be optimized for program specific size, weight, power consumption, cost and rugged requirements.
