14 November 2006 -- Texas Instruments (TI) has debuted its Small Form Factor Software Defined Radio (SDR) Development Platform, targeted at the portable military communications market.
The platform, developed in collaboration with Xilinx Inc. and other third parties, provides the entire signal chain hardware from antenna to baseband as well as a software board support package that supports a complete suite of software development tools in a single integrated development platform.
"SDR is an emerging technology that has been historically constrained by its inherent complex signal processing requirements. With the SDR Development Platform, developers can now harness the performance and efficiency of TI's TMS320DM644x device to overcome those traditional barriers," said Ram Sathappan, SDR Marketing Manager at TI. "Through this development kit, TI is making a strong commitment to the SDR market by providing a robust silicon, hardware and software roadmap that will drive down cost and power consumption."
With the kit, developers can easily design waveforms as well as create and test single or multi-protocol radios for applications in military, public safety, commercial, Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) and land mobile radio (LMR) communication systems as well as RFID readers, the company said. Additionally, as the platform is integrated to work with Simulink model-based design tool, developers have the option to use C/HDL or MATLAB Simulink to quickly test proof-of-concept designs and then optimize the architecture for cost and power.
Next-generation radios require a software defined architecture that supports multiple protocols while providing standardised hardware that can implement a broad range of systems from simple baseband to complex wideband radios. For example, a radio for military applications, such as a soldier radio, may need to support multiple waveforms as it is supplied to different groups within the military. In public safety applications, multi-protocol radios need to be able to support various emergency bands including police and fire bands.
The SDR Development Platform is a hardware/software co-development environment that supplies the full signal chain for a multi-protocol software defined radio, including RF front-end module, A/D and D/A data conversion module and digital processing module. By separating out the baseband, IF, and RF as distinct modules rather than as a single fixed architecture, developers are able to extend their radio development capabilities, as well as optimise for cost and power consumption, by substituting their own or third party modules. This flexibility gives developers the ability to adjust their products around the industry's constantly varying requirements. TI said.
The digital processing module capitalises on the performance and architecture benefits of TI's TMS320DM6446 system on chip (SoC) comprised of TI's TMS320CC64x+ digital signal processor (DSP) core and an ARM9 general-purpose processor. The high-performance DSP core streamlines complex signal processing, while the GPP supports network and application processing.
The DM6446 device is equipped with both a DSP and ARM on a single chip, thus developers benefit from reduced system space and cost, TI explained. Additionally, TI's DM6446 SoC comes complete with a full set of peripherals necessary for SDR, including serial ports, USB and Ethernet connections and DDR2 and NAND flash memory. The module also comes with a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA for modem co-processing and acceleration functions.
The use of the Xilinx Virtex-4 SX35 gives developers enough performance headroom with low enough power to implement custom IP and acceleration functions that have varying requirements from one protocol to another supported on the same hardware, the company said.
The Data Conversion module includes two ADS5500 analogue to digital converters, offering 14-bits performance at 125 Mega samples per second (MSPS) and one DAC5687, a 16-bit dual channel digital to analogue data converter with 500 MSPS performance from TI. The standard RF module included in the kit covers from 360 MHz to 960 MHz with a selectable 5 MHz or 20 MHz bandwidth. The platform also utilises TI's MSP430 ultra low power MCU and power management technology.
As part of the development platform, TI has brought together several companies to provide the necessary software components and tools to enable rapid SDR development. Lyrtech developed the hardware for the platform and integrated all of the software components of the kit. Lyrtech will also provide custom support for TI's SDR Development Platform.
Green Hills' Integrity real-time operating system running on the ARM provides the environment for implementing higher layers of radio protocols. Objective Interface Systems (OIS) is supplying the Object Request Broker (ORB) middleware for the ARM9, the DSP, and FPGA for the SCA version of the platform. The ORB middleware substantially reduces development complexity and enables algorithm code portability, TI said.
The Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) supplies the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) core framework, as per version 2.2, that enables flexible implementation of different waveforms and protocols. Full reference design specs, as well as a complete bill-of-materials (BOM), will be available to developers, TI confirmed.
