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HUNTSVILLE, Ala.— October 23 2018 Abaco Systems today announced that, not only has the company begun full production of its newly-announced VP430 Direct RF Processing System – first customer shipments occurred in September – but that it is actively creating inventory for those customers needing short-turn delivery before the end of the year.
“We’re seeing enormous demand for the VP430 – beyond even our expectations – with numerous enquiries as to whether we can deliver by the end of December,” said Peter Thompson, Vice President, Product Management at Abaco. “I’m delighted to say that our answer to that question is that we can indeed. We’re getting excellent service from Xilinx, providing all the production parts we need in order to manufacture boards and provide our customers with the fast-turn shipment they say they need.”
As well as having comprehensively characterized the performance of the VP430 (the data is available upon request), Abaco has published a white paper designed to help developers understand the capabilities of the system. ‘Technologies for responding to rapid developments in cognitive RF and EW’ describes strategies to address emerging EW threats by leveraging reconfigurable hardware in a multi-processor system architecture, employing a low latency processing powerhouse with FPGAs and RFSoCs, and how to select the right processor architecture for the job.
The VP430 is capable of enabling the most advanced electronic warfare applications, as well as many others. Examples of the applications either under development, or planned for development, include a real time passive optical network, a next generation direction finding system for battlefield communications and a new electronic attack system.
Designed for advanced electronic warfare applications requiring MIMO (multiple input/output), beamforming, sensor processing and radar signal processing capabilities, the VP430 is a major step forward in performance and density, enabling the use of fewer boards and much less power while delivering increased processing throughput. In fact, for comparable capability, it occupies one fourth of the slots that earlier generation solutions would require.
The VP430 includes the option to be built with a FireFly™ 8-channel VITA 66.4 fiber optic interface for transfers of greater than 12 GBps for applications in which the throughput of the native VPX PCI Express® Gen3 data plane is inadequate or when a remote client requires streaming data.
Responding to the cost- and complexity challenge of RF systems with multiple channels – more channels means more expensive and large RF signal up/down conversion and signal conditioning – the VP430 enables direct RF sampling which can be implemented in the digital domain, bringing greater flexibility to the signal processing chain. Additionally, simplified integration with RF sampling devices removes the complexity of JESD204B high speed serial interfaces
The new Xilinx RFSoC is a revolutionary step in integration technology bringing a combination of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processing capability, a multi-processor embedded ARM® Cortex-A53 Application processing unit (APU), an ARM real time processing unit (RPU) and eight input analog-to-digital converter and eight digital-to-analog converter channels. Additionally, the Zynq® Ultrascale+™ architecture integrates all this with features to enable high security IP protection. The RFSoC brings extreme analog bandwidth with a sustained throughput of 6 GSPS per channel and greater than 12 GBps per channel digital offload capability.
About Abaco Systems
With more than 30 years’ experience, Abaco Systems is a global leader in open architecture computing and electronic systems for aerospace, defense and industrial applications. We create innovative, modular solutions based on open standards that are characterized by outstanding price/performance, ultimate rugged reliability and minimal SWaP. Our goal is to be a significant contributor to our customers’ success, partnering with them to reduce cost, time-to-deployment and risk and supporting them over the long term. With an active presence in hundreds of national asset platforms on land, sea and in the air, Abaco Systems is trusted where it matters most. www.abaco.com