Pentek offers dual multiband transceiver with FPGA that improves A-D performance by 10 dB
UPPER SADDLE RIVER, N.J., 19 Dec. 2007.Pentek Inc. in Upper Saddle River, N.J., is releasing the Model 7141 dual multiband transceiver with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) that is a software radio system for connection to HF or IF ports of a communications system.
The Model 7141 is an enhanced successor to Pentek's Model 7140 transceiver for SIGINT, software radio, and communications applications. Pentek has boosted analog performance so that the signal-to-noise ratio and the spurious free dynamic range are improved by 10 dB, when compared to many competitive products.
"Because our customers typically use signals covering a wide dynamic range, better signal quality means that small signals previously lost in noise can now be detected," says Pentek Vice President Rodger Hosking, explaining that even though A-D converter device manufacturers cite attractive specifications, the challenge in realizing these specifications depends primarily on the printed circuit board layout, component shielding and power supply filtering.
The Model 7141 accepts two full scale analog HF or IF inputs on front-panel MMCX connectors at +10 dBm into 50 ohms with transformer coupling into Linear Technology's LTC2255 14-bit 125 MHz A-D converters. A-D output samples are delivered into the Virtex-II Pro FPGA for signal processing or for routing to other module resources.
A TI/Graychip GC4016 quad digital downconverter accepts either four 14-bit inputs or three 16-bit digital inputs from the FPGA, which determines the source of GC4016 input data. These sources include the A-D converters, FPGA signal processing engines, SDRAM delay memory and data sources on the PCI bus. Each GC4016 channel may be set for independent tuning frequency and bandwidth. For an A-D sample clock frequency of 100 MHz, the output bandwidth for each channel ranges from 5 kHz up to 2.5 MHz. By combining two or four channels, output bandwidth of up to 5 or 10 MHz can be achieved.
For more information contact Pentek online at www.pentek.com.
