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Altitude interference mitigation module system

The United States Navy's Advanced Technology Engineering Group chose Sundance's hardware for their ultra complex, ultra sophisticated electronic warfare algorithms, providing unique hybrid DSP FPGA hardware and a model based design solution to program it.

Housed inside the Sundance DSP8080-AIMM (Altitude Interference Mitigation Module) system, the Navy's system architecture and algorithms are helping to improve the warfighter's surveillance of the battle space. The DSP8080-AIMM combats communication interferences from unwanted sources and provides pin point accuracy for remote ship, tank and aircraft operators in understanding the source of a signal.

Provided in a compact, lightweight and low cost configuration, the DSP8080-AIMM accommodates beam forming of a high quantity of digital drop receivers (> 100 channels) and can interface to a range of coherent tuners. The system is flexible enough to provide radio direction finding and geo-location by-product, and outperforms its nearest competition in price, performance, size and weight.

Key to making the DSP8080-AIMM a reality for the Navy was the decision to use PARS (Parallel Application from Rapid Simulation) design environment. PARS generated the entire target code including, DSP codes, FPGA codes and all of the inter-processor communication and synchronization codes from a Simulink model. The Navy's algorithms were implemented as either IP cores on FPGAs or optimized DSP code targeting the floating and fixed point DSPs.

The DSP8080 utilizes multiple high-performance DSPs from Texas Instruments, including the TMS320C6416, a fixed-point processor running at 1 GHz, and the TMS320C6713, a floating-point DSP. The system also utilizes several Virtex 4 SX55 Xilinx FPGAs with the processing elements mounted onto a range of integrated Sundance platforms including the SMT374, SMT364, SMT318-SX and SMT361Q.

"We're proud to be part of this unique solution for the Navy"
Jacob Alamat, Marketing Manager for high performance processors, Texas Instruments, U.S.A.

Communication interoperability and Cognitive Radio

SUPELEC, French "Grande Ecole" of Engineering, chose Sundance's multiprocessor software defined radio (SDR) development platform for the Smart Radio Challenge '07.

SUPELEC and the Signal, Communication and Embedded Electronics Research Team were finalists of the Smart Radio Challenge by using the Sundance heterogeneous multiprocessor DSP and FPGA systems to resolve the communication interoperability question for cognitive radio supporting multiple standards.
Dr. Christophe Moy, Researcher, SCEE Laboratory, SUPELEC, France

Digital Low Level RF System - ALBA Synchrotron Accelerator

CELLS, a consortium in charge of building the synchrotron in Barcelona, has chosen the SMT8036 kit to design and build a prototype of digital low level RF system for the ALBA Synchrotron.

ALBA is a circular-shaped machine, called a synchrotron, which uses arrays of magnets, called insertion devices to generate bright beams of synchrotron light. ALBA will be located near Barcelona. A synchrotron is an accelerator of electrons. The electrons are maintained in a circular ring by magnetic field and produce X-Rays tangentially to their trajectory. These X-Rays are used by several beamlines located around the storage ring to analyse samples for chemistry, materials science, magnetism, life sciences, macromolecular crystallography and industry.

The Sundance system is intended to be used to regulate amplitude voltages (within 0.1% rms), phase (within 0.1° rms) and resonant frequency of the RF cavities of the accelerator machine. This type of cavity restores the lost energy of the electron beam due to synchrotron radiation and they also focus the X-Ray beam longitudinally. The 500MHz RF input signals are down-converted to 20MHz IF by a front-end module. The IF signals, which are equivalent in phase and amplitude to the RF signals, are sent to the ADCs to be demodulated into I/Q components. The FPGA regulates the amplitude, phase and resonance frequency of the cavity with control and tuning loops. The DACs transform the IF control signals into analogue signals that are finally up-converted to RF in a second analogue module. The DSP connected to the FPGA reports 14 diagnostic signals, generated in the FPGA during the processing stage, to the Host PC. All of the I/Q reference, I/Q cavity, I/Q computed and I/Q control actions signals are stored and displayed using a MATLAB interface.

The ALBA synchrotron is currently being built. The initial 7 beamlines will be able to start their operations from 2010 to carry out a wide variety of experiments using ALBA's light. Dr. Francis Perez, Researcher, CELLS, Spain

"Sundance's technical support is very good. I have always received very fast answers and solutions from Sundance when we have had problems. We are really satisfied. We are also very satisfied with the sales department. They are also very fast sending quotations and we have always received the Sundance products without any delay (I would say even in advance in most of the cases)."
Angela Salom, ALBA RF Group, CELLS, Spain

DSP-based RF control system for FAIR

FAIR is an international accelerator facility with intense and high energy beams of antiprotons and ions designed for research purposes. The GSI RF Department is in charge of designing a fast DSP based closed loop RF control system in the context of the project FAIR.

A first project led to develop a cavity synchronization system which allows the synchronisation of the gap signals of different cavities. The system was designed in such a way that the cavities may run at different harmonics. Now, it is also possible to synchronise the cavity with the beam thanks to a closed-loop beam phase control unit.

The performance of the DSP-based phase and amplitude detector subsystem is sufficient to implement a beam-phase control or other radio frequency feedback systems. These digital low level RF systems are typical of heavy ion synchrotrons. The delay caused by the system is less than 10us, and the accuracy of the detected phase is better than 1‹ for non-modulated signals.

The overall system is based on different scalable modules which can be used flexibly in completely different applications. The DSP system includes analogue preprocessing in the IF range, ADC and DAC modules, suitable digital interfaces and convenient diagnostics features. The Sundance hardware consists of the SMT374 with two TMS320C6713 DSPs, and the SMT370 with high-resolution dual 14-bit ADC and dual 16-bit DAC channels. The modules sit on the SMT310Q PCI carrier board, which offers two further expansion sites.

An RF maintenance and diagnostics project has recently been started to allow remote firmware management of all programmable devices. Furthermore, it will then be possible to collect and analyse diagnostics information from any relevant RF components on-site.
Dr.-ing. Harald Klingbeil, GSI, Darmstadt, Germany

Exploring 60GHz Band Wireless Communication

Dr. Amir K. Khandani's team uses Sundance communications development platform for their research in 60GHz band wireless communication.

The bandwidth available in the 60GHz band will enable wireless communication at rates of Gbps. Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing a 60GHz band wireless communication system, which will make possible a study of RF channels and testing of algorithm implementations. For this system to meet the 500MHz bandwidth requirement, it needs to have a Gsps analog front end and very high speed signal processing units. Also, in order to move the massive volume of data across processing units, high speed data links must be present. The Sundance platform is the most effective all-in-one solution available on the market.

"We are very impressed by the quality of the Sundance products and their close professional involvement to speed up the use and maximize our benefits from their systems."
Dr. Amir K. Khandani, Professor, Canada Research Chair, Leader of Coding and Signal Transmission Lab, ECE, University of Waterloo, Canada

"The Sundance Platform in combination with the 3L Diamond design environment provided necessary tools to begin our work. The 3L Diamond SMT Library abstracted complicated hardware modules, so efforts can be focused on algorithm implementation and system integration. Given the fact of system complexity, the timely and case specific in detailed support from Sundance and Diamond's team are helpful and very much appreciated."
Rong-An Zheng, Researcher, Coding and Signal Transmission Lab, University of Waterloo

"Sundance has provided an elegant pairing of high analog bandwidth to powerful digital processing. The ease and speed with which the platform's components can be leveraged shows the care that went into the system's construction and has made it possible for us to rapidly prototype designs with very high throughput demands."
Phil Kinsman, Engineering Student, Coding and Signal Transmission Lab, University of Waterloo

In-flight test instruments for the Airbus A380 and A400M

Thales Avionics chose Sundance's systems for the next generation of particle laser Doppler anemometry test equipments, inflight data recorder systems for the A380 and new standby LIDAR instruments for the Airbus A400M.

Thales Avionics has successfully deployed the Sundance's hardware solutions for the projects DALEV and NESLIE. The hardware systems are based on the rugged 3U PXI and 3U PXI Express form factors. Xilinx Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 FPGA devices are used to implement the highperformance DSP processing tasks, mainly some very high-speed 1K, 2K and 4K-point FFT cores designed by our favourite IP core supplier.

The anemometry test equipment sustains a data rate of 640Mbytes/s from a single channel input, execute fixed-point FFT algorithms, DSP calculations and accumulation operations in real-time.
The in-flight data recorder acquires raw data in continuous mode, without any data loss, from a single 8-bit ADC at the rate of 640MSPS and 400MSPS selectable by software.

"The investment made by Sundance in our ADC technology is testament not only to the technical performance of our solutions but also the cost advantage we provide in very high performance systems."

Low-power DSP-based processor board for micro-satellites

MIT Space Systems Laboratory chose Sundance's C6701 processor board for the International Space Station's microsatellites.

SPHERES is a program which operates multiple micro-satellites aboard the International Space Station. The free-floating autonomous satellites help researchers at MIT, NASA, other research institutions, and private industry to mature technologies for Distributed Satellite Systems. The satellites are used to develop metrology, control, and autonomy algorithms for tasks such as autonomous docking and satellite formation flight.

Microstrip detector for X-ray spectroscopy

The Daresbury Laboratory has developed a new highresolution silicon microstripbased instrument in collaboration with Cambridge and Southampton universities for the study of dynamic processes using realtime Xray spectroscopy.

The XSTRIP detector system extends the scope of Energy Dispersive EXAFS instruments down to microsecond timescales, allowing better understanding of chemical reactions and phase changes, such as protein folding or the operation of catalysts.

The data acquisition subsystem has been designed around a standard PC architecture using the Sundance modular solutions. This not only reduces the time and cost of development, but it also allows significant flexibility in the data processing architecture.

The data acquisition continuously runs 32 channels of high-resolution 14-bit ADCs (four SMT356s run 8-ADC channels in parallel each) to digitise data at a rate of 160MSPS. Samples are then pre-processed in the SMT358 Virtex FPGA and stored into its 8MB of embedded ZBT SRAM, prior to be gathered to the fixed-point C6201 DSP on the SMT332. This data acquisition subsystem is mounted on two SMT310Q PCI carrier boards. These handle 320MB of data generated, and each of them provides four expansion sites for the two digitizer modules, the FPGA pre-processing and the DSP computation stages.

The XSTRIP instrument has been completed after 18 months of engineering efforts and it has demonstrated high performance and flexibility for beamline 9.3 at the Daresbury Synchrotron Radiation Source. The system is up to 50 times faster than previous detector systems. XSTRIP has also been successfully tested at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.

Jon Headspith, Daresbury Laboratory, United Kingdom

MIMO RADAR: Software defined radio and Radar (SDR)

Dr. Joel Johnson's team uses Sundance development platforms for their research in building a lowpower experimental radar system.

Scientists at the ElectroScience Laboratory in Columbus, are currently developing a software defined radar (SDR) platform that can adaptively switch between different modes of operation by modifying both transmit waveforms and receive signal-processing tasks on the fly. This lowpower experimental radar system features an instantaneous analog bandwidth of 500MHz which can be tuned to operated anywhere between 2-18GHz. High-speed A/D and D/A converters along with Xilinx FPGAs and fast DSPs allow for maximum flexibility in algorithm design. Additionally, parallel coherent transmit and receive channels enable the exploration of multi-channel radar modes such as multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) radar and polarimetric radar. Target phenomenology and the urban propagation environment for radar are two key areas of study which will also be explored with this system.

Software defined radar features:

500 MHz or greater waveform bandwidth,
RF Front-end tunable from 1-18 GHz,
High-speed Xilinx FPGAs and Texas Instruments 32-bit DSPs for implementing real-time signal processing,
Information driven active sensing layer based on a game theoretic approach to sensor management implements competitive sensor tasking to control the selection of the current radar operating mode.

"Multiple transmit and receive channels will allow us to explore new MIMO radar techniques which take advantage of spatial diversity to improve target detection and tracking performance. In addition, the programmable nature of the transmitters and receivers will allow us to explore adaptive waveforms for target recognition. The first step is to build the hardware and implement the basic signal processing foundation necessary to make the system work, and then proceed from there. We're starting with two transmit and two receive channels with the goal of expanding to 2 transmit and 4 receive channels, and possibly 4 transmit and 4 receive channels."
Mark Frankford, Electroscience Laboratory, Department ECE, Ohio State University, U.S.A.

Portable humanitarian mine detection systems

Qinetiq has developed a PHMD instrument using a pulse induction metal detector combined with ground penetrating radar (GPR) array.

Sundance, the leading supplier and manufacturer of advanced digital signal processing (DSP) and reconfigurable FPGA systems, played an important part in the development of state-of-the-art Portable Humanitarian Mine Detector (PHMD) technology. The PHMD system developed by QinetiQ used a pulse induction metal detector combined with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) array to discriminate between minimum metal antipersonnel mines and small metal clutter.

The PHMD system was trialled in the field as part of a concerted effort to improve the speed and accuracy of mine detection.

System processing, 3D focusing and anomaly detection was carried out using two of Sundance's SMT365 DSP modules tightly coupled to a high density FPGA. The SMT365 features a 600MHz TMS320C6416 Fixed Point DSP with 4800MIPS peak performance and 8 Mbytes of high speed ZBTRAM. The FPGA is a Xilinx Virtex II device and enables on-the-fly pre-processing of data before transfer to the DSP.

"By combining a range of high performance and break-through technologies the QinetiQ team made a very significant contribution to improving the speed and accuracy of mine detection, and Sundance is proud to have played a part in that."

Real time target tracking algorithm

Polytech'Clermont-Ferrand, a French Engineering school, ran a university project in partnership with Sundance. The main work was focused on building a standalone embedded system based on the Sundance advanced video system: SMT8039.

This system is able to detect a person or an object in a public area from a video camera input. The application executes a tracking algorithm in real time. The targets are identified by a cross and a rectangular frame. The processing is implemented on the Texas Instruments DM642 DSP and the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA.

The embedded application was designed with the 3L Diamond software to give best performance. The algorithm is split into four DSP software tasks and the frame-grabbing is done in the FPGA firmware:

Acquire the current image and store it into a buffer,
Subtract every pixel of the current image from every pixel of the first image (stored at the beginning of the process),
Compare each result with a threshold to get a black and white image. So the moving objects will be illustrated in black.
Calculate the barycentre of all the black points, and display the result on a console screen with a cross and a rectangle around the person.

Typical video applications illustrated by this concept are:

Human and object detection, recognition and identification,
Person or object counting,
Traffic monitoring,
Security and Surveillance IP Cameras...

Polytech'Clermont - CUST, Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, France

Scanners for sawmills (Edging, Green and Dry sorting)

FinScan is an expert in realtime image processing, optimizing systems for the sawmill and veneer industry.

"Sundance has been a supplier to FinScan for more than 15 years and in that period our BoardMaster product has undergone a constant and steady improvement in performance as a direct result of the Modular hardware concept that Sundance applies. Component obsolesce has been managed with flair, inspiration and effectively and our current solution is based on the SMT123 and SMT145 and we have more than 100 of our scanners in daily use in sawmills around the World.

We have always been confident that Sundance products were of top-spot quality and on the rare occasion when we required support the Sundance Team were as reliable as the products."

The next generation of BoardMaster is being deployed using the SMT123-T based on quad optical fibre links, Virtex-5 FX30T and PCI Express interface.
Urpo Meskanen, Project Manager, FinScan, Finland

Simulators for ARGOS and SARSAT satellite beacons

EREMS has designed and developed simulators for several generations of ARGOS and SARSAT satellite beacons. EREMS specialises in the design of electronic instruments for high technology applications. EREMS has its own engineering, manufacturing and tests facilities located in the heart of the European Space region: Toulouse, France. For over 25 years, EREMS has been developing its expertise in the design for embedded systems integrated with customised software applications. The last model used in acceptance integration and validation phase of the GALILEO Payloads programme. ARGOS and SARSAT satellite beacons enhance performance for data collection, search and rescue. Each simulator features: * A compact PC including one SMT395-VP30 DSP module and an ADC board. This system computes and generates the modulation waves of the ARGOS/SARSAT beacons in real time (up to 32 at a time over 4 channels). * Digitalised signal generated are controlled and transmitted in real time by the PC to the payloads. The user software interface and the DSP software were designed by EREMS using 3L Diamond. The DSP software code was developed and optimised in Texas Instruments assembly language in order to support the beacon data throughput. The instrument can generate the following type of modulations: BPSF, QPSK and GMSK. The simulation of transmission channel includes phase error, gain error, Doppler and quadrature error. The next generation of simulator is being developed (program 2009-2010) using the SMT362 dual C6455 DSP and Virtex-4 FPGA device. This new device will simulate more satellite beacons over more channels in real time.

Software defined radio and Radar (SDR)

Dr. Joel Johnson's team uses Sundance development platforms for their research in building a lowpower experimental radar system.

Scientists at the ElectroScience Laboratory in Columbus, are currently developing a software defined radar (SDR) platform that can adaptively switch between different modes of operation by modifying both transmit waveforms and receive signal-processing tasks on the fly. This low-power experimental radar system features an instantaneous analog bandwidth of 500MHz which can be tuned to operated anywhere between 2-18GHz. High-speed A/D and D/A converters along with Xilinx FPGAs and fast DSPs allow for maximum flexibility in algorithm design. Additionally, parallel coherent transmit and receive channels enable the exploration of multi-channel radar modes such as multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) radar and polarimetric radar. Target phenomenology and the urban propagation environment for radar are two key areas of study which will also be explored with this system.

Software defined radar features:

500 MHz or greater waveform bandwidth,
RF Front-end tunable from 1-18 GHz,
High-speed Xilinx FPGAs and Texas Instruments 32-bit DSPs for implementing real-time signal processing,
Information driven active sensing layer based on a game theoretic approach to sensor management implements competitive sensor tasking to control the selection of the current radar operating mode.

Spectroscopic data acquisition instruments

Radio astronomers are using a multiprocessorbased data acquisition instrument to investigate the magnetic field in the interstellar medium of our Galaxy.

This instrument is allowing them to measure the direction and field strength of the magnetic field of the Milky Way. Based on the Sundance hardware architecture combined with 3L Diamond codesign tool-suite, the system is now deployed on the 26-m radiotelescope of the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, Canada. It features an instantaneous bandwidth of 500 MHz and a spectral resolution of 2048 channels. The phase relation of the two input signals is measured in real-time and using 3L Diamond, the instrument design was completed in only 18 months, allowing scientists to deploy the data acquisition system earlier than would have otherwise been possible. Based on the NRC system, DRAO astronomers are now leading a project to utilize this method with other radiotelescopes around the globe including the 100-m Effelsberg telescope in Germany and the 64-m telescope at the Parkes Observatory in Australia.

"The detailed study of magnetism in the Milky Way is made possible by new developments and technologies in radio astronomy including new wide-band antennas, wide-band digital receivers and new data analysis tools. By coupling the 3L Diamond tool-suite with modular hardware from Sundance we were able to quickly develop a cost effective, very high performance multiprocessing solution and use it years ahead of expectations."
Maik Wolleben, Covington Fellow at the Canadian National Research Council, Canada.

"We were delighted to be selected for this ground-breaking project and to help create a system that is driving fundamental understanding. By using Diamond, the NRC designers were able to leverage our pre-packaged integration with the Sundance hardware and focus their effort on delivering the spectroscopic DAQ in record time."
Dr. Peter Robertson, 3L Managing Director, United Kingdom.

SUNRISE mission - Study of the solar magnetic field

The Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia (CSIC) in collaboration with other research institutes are in charge of designing the Imaging Magnetograph Experiment (IMaX).

IMaX is an experimental solar magnetograph that produces very high resolution vector magnetograms of the solar surface with a spatial resolution of 70 km. IMaX is one of the post focal instruments of the Sunrise mission that contains a 1 metre aperture telescope. The stratospheric balloon is planned to fly for 10-12 days from Antarctica in the basket of the NASA Long Duration Stratospheric Balloon.

Image acquisition and camera control is made with two dedicated SMT374 boards. FPGA's main tasks are camera control, image accumulation and pre-processing (demodulating the Stokes signals). The DSPs are in charge of compressing the image with a lossless algorithm.

The DSP Master synchronises the Host computer, the acquisition and demodulation logic, the optical devices logic, and the other three DSP coprocessors. The coprocessors are used for the lossless JPEG-LS compression of images. Communication between DSPs is done through a proprietary bus called IMaXBus: a hardware and software layer that abstracts the connections between DSPs and FPGA. As information transferred through the IMaxBus is accessed by a custom SDRAM controller, all memory operations use long bursts making the whole system very efficient. It allows the images to be directly transferred from one CCD (connected to DSP Master) to any other DSP in the system. The images are demodulated, compressed and sent to the DSP Master. A header is added to every image and then it is sent to the Host for further processing, telemetry and storage.

The IMaX project included the integration and calibration tests with solar light, integration in the SUNRISE platform and the polar flight (summer 2009).

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