Abaco Systems uses Xilinx RF SoC for electronic warfare-grade system
Aligned with the Sensor Open Standard Architecture (SOSA) standard, for modular open systems, required by the US Air Force, US Army and US Navy. The VP460 Direct RF processing system is available from Abaco Systems.
The company claims that it is the first 6U VPX implementation of the Xilinx 16×16 RF SoC (RFSoC) technology combined with Xilinx’s Ultrascale+ FPGA with high bandwidth memory (HBM).
With 16 ADCs sampling at rates up to 2Gsamples per second with two bytes per sample, even the modern PCIe Gen3 high speed data connection is too slow for a direct transfer. To overcome this challenge, the VP460 includes – in addition to the PCIe Gen3 data plane – up to 64 high speed serial lanes to the Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale+ HBM device, supporting protocols such as PCIe Gen3, 10/40G Ethernet or Aurora.
Designed to enable development of advanced, next generation multi-channel electronic warfare systems in application areas such as MIMO, beamforming, sensor processing, radar, software defined radio (SDR) and signals intelligence, the VP460 is characterised by its high performance and channel density – it has 16 ADC and 16 DAC synchronised channels operating at 6.4Gsamples per second. It also reduces slot count by one fourth for comparable performance
It also has a user-programmable FPGA fabric and multi-core Zynq Arm processing sub-system. The HBM VU37P device features the speed and capabilities of an UltraScale+ FPGA together with integrated DRAM in the FPGA package, and is capable of up to 460Gbytes per second on-chip data transfer rates.
By reducing RF signal chain complexity and leveraging heterogeneous processing capabilities, the VP460 allows input/output channel density to be maximised and data offloaded more efficiently – without sacrificing onboard signal processing capabilities.
“Today’s electronic battlefield is seeing the accelerated growth of smart sensor systems – and is demanding more channels, more bandwidth, and as a result, more data processing capabilities,” said Peter Thompson, vice president, Product Management at Abaco. “The VP460 is a revolution in COTS RF and FPGA processing, perfectly balancing the need for high performance FPGA processing, the ease of a hardened embedded processor and the ultra-low latency of integrated analogue interfaces,” he added.
