Next-generation military radio systems

Paul Dillien, High Tech Marketing
November 07, 2016

Introduction

With the technological challenges surrounding Software Defined Radio (SDR) largely overcome, the deployment of first generation sets is underway. Possible enhancements such as increasing the bandwidth while simultaneously reducing the size, weight, power, and cost of the device have yet to be developed. Beyond this, Cognitive Radio represents the next major advance in wireless technology, holding out the tantalizing promise of significantly greater spectrum utilization, however, there are some significant barriers which still must be surmounted.

Software Defined Radio (SDR)

Software Defined Radio has evolved over the last decade to become the latest generation of wireless technology for the modern war fighter. This has been spurred by innovations in programmable hardware that have allowed unprecedented sophistication in software. Hardware advances in both the logic and RF domains have enabled the creation of radios with far greater capabilities in much smaller form factors. For example, the capacities and additional features built into FPGAs have grown exponentially. Today it is possible to design using a 20nm device from Intel (formerly Altera) boasting up to 660k logic elements, 39 Mbits of on-chip memory, over 3,300 DSP blocks, 48 serial transceivers each capable of 17.4 Gbps, and dual 32-bit ARM processor cores clocking at 1.5 GHz. These offer baseband processing far in excess of what was feasible even a few years ago.

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