VHF, UHF PMC digitizer

Processing analog data quickly is the mission of GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms’ ICS-1556B ADC PMC module. Designed for SDR, radar, sonar, SIGINT, and tactical communications, the four-channel PMC relies on four 14-bit, 400 MHz A/D converters to fire-hose information onto the card at a rate that GE Fanuc claims is “unsurpassed in the industry.” We’ll take their word on that, but we do know that at this rate, data conversion is as close to real time as possible – always desirable in these kinds of applications. This module is brought to us by the GE Fanuc ICS division, which earned its stripes for super-duper high-performance sonar processing cards and algorithms. High rate plus high resolution means that VHF and some UHF spectra can be directly digitized while the onboard Xilinx Virtex-5 SX95T provides powerful data processing of DDC, IF, or other data stream functions. For instance, users can program in wideband digital down conversion, FFT, time sampling, or even barrel shifting for block floating point conversion on received data. GE Fanuc makes this easier via the company’s Hardware Development Kit, or the company’s applications engineers can craft custom FPGA cores for customer-specific requirements.