When SDR performance matters

Why would the developers in software-defined radio market care about the Virtex-6? Isn’t the high end of the FPGA market supposed to be about integer performance and high-speed I/O? Well, let’s check in with this week’s SDR Forum in Washington, DC. Pentek has just released a new board-level family, dubbed Cobalt, based on the Virtex-6.

Pentek certainly has nothing against traditional DSP, or Texas Instruments Inc. as a vendor – in fact, this XMC-sized mezzanine module sports TI A/D and D/A converters galore. But that tricky issue of small size, specifically the need to perform radar, telemetry, and SIGINT processing in a tiny module, has driven the use of the Virtex-6.

One key differentiator in Cobalt is the DMA engine, which aids in real-time parallel data acquisition to timestamp data streams of varying size. Combine that with 16-bit resolution on both D/A and A/D ends, and it’s pretty obvious why the highest-performing member of the Virtex family was chosen.

These kind of designs are not only the future of SDR in both commercial and military applications, they’re the future of radar, electronic warfare, and electronic intelligence platforms. In five years, it might be hard to find a data-acquisition module that hasn’t moved to an AMC, FMC, or XMC form factor.