Speaking of military avionics

My last item mentioned Xilinx’s alliance work in commercial aviation, and how military applications need more system-level standards for FPGAs in advanced communications and intelligence. Jon Titus pointed me to a perfect example of emerging applications where FPGAs replace DSPs in the field of C4ISR.

At the Real Time & Embedded Computing Conference in Santa Clara Jan. 29, TEK Microsystems Inc. introduced a digitizer board based on three Xilinx Virtex-5 devices. The QuiXilica Tarvos-V5 VXS, used in phased-array and parallel processing in radar and signals intelligence applications, combines the Virtex-5 with 16-bit A/D converters from Linear Technology Corp. (the LTC2209) and 16-bit D/A converters from Maxim Integrated Products (MAX5891).  The result is a digitzer with six 16-bit ADC input channels at 185 megasamples per second, and a coherent 16-bit D/A output channel.

This is not the first time TEK has used FPGAs – older digitizers are based on the Virtex II Pro. But a decade ago, most such designs would have been based on multiple fixed-point DSPs. Many FPGAs are still less than optimal for data flow applications. Until better high-level cores are offered for digital filtering and image manipulation, it is premature to declare the death of DSPs in military avionics. But the new TEK board demonstrates why the work of the FPGA Mission Assurance Center is so important.