Rugged MOSA-based 3U module transitions seamlessly to mission hardware
Stephen Law
Electronics Embedded Systems defence militaryCURTIS-WRIGHT VPX3-E320 Ruggedized Universal Software Defined Radio (SDR) card is a 3U OpenVPX module developed under agreement with NI, an OpenVPX functional equivalent variant of the Ettus Research USRP E320 and is fully compatible with the USRP Hardware Driver (UHD). Unit features a flexible 2 x 2 MIMO RF Agile Transceiver with 12-bit ADCs and DACs. Unit enables applications developed in the lab to be seamlessly transitioned to mission hardware. The conduction cooled 3U OpenVPX module speeds and eases the integration of critical SDR capabilities, such as deployed SIGINT, tactical communications, and reconfigurable jamming, into platforms deployed in harsh environments. The board supports tunable bandwidths from 200kHz to 56MHz over a frequency range from 70MHz to 6GHz. Baseband signal processing uses a Xilinx Zynq 7045 System-on-Chip FPGA to deliver accelerated FPGA computations and software-based processing using its dual-core Arm CPU. Device configuration can be accomplished with the NI USRP UHD, either through GNU Radio or with common programming languages such as Python or C++.
