PMC module

GE Fanuc has announced the ICS-1554 PMC module with four 16-bit ADCs sampling synchronously at frequencies up to 160 MHz. It is suitable for communications, radar, wireless test and measurement, 3G and 4G mobile station development, signal intelligence, smart antenna, radar beam forming and satellite ground stations.

Combining the device with an appropriate host processor offers a single slot IF processing solution for software — defined radio applications.

Simultaneous downconversion of up to 16 arbitrary signal bands is implemented by four Graychip GC4016 digital downconverters. A Xilinx Virtex 5 SX95 FPGA is provided for user-defined signal processing functions, giving greater capacity and lower power consumption than previous generations of digital receivers.

The FPGA, which is almost 100% available to the application, provides a signal processing capability that can be loaded with standard functions such as wide band DDC, FFT and time stamping, or programmed by the user.

The device achieves its performance in part through the digital down-converters, while support for simultaneous wide- and narrow-band operation is enabled by using dual decoupled FIFO memory.

Sixty-four user I/Os connected directly from the FPGA to the Pn4 connector provide an alternative high-speed data path from the module. The I/O pins support LVTTL and LVDS transmit signalling and can be factory-configured for LVDS receive operation.

Included is a hardware development kit providing support for users who wish to implement their own signal processing algorithms in the FPGA.

Alternatively, the company can develop FPGA cores specific to customer needs.