The project is currently in the prototyping phase with field trials expected in late 2006 and if successful, production shipments may follow in 2007.

"Spectrum's commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) SDR-4000 platform provides DSC with high performance real-time processing in a low power, small form factor configuration ideal for our laser RADAR," said Ken Belsley, Chief Scientist at DSC. "In addition to offering a COTS solution, Spectrum has also integrated several third party hardware and software components into the subsystem to reduce our time to field trial and enable our development team to concentrate on enhancing critical features of the application rather than working on the subsystem functionality."

"It is exciting to see the SDR-4000's inherent flexibility utilized in DSC's advanced DOD application. While designed for military communications, we knew our third generation SDR technology would bring benefit to market segments beyond C4ISR," said Mike Farley, President of Spectrum USA. "The performance and architecture of the SDR-4000 makes it suitable for DSC's development, field trials and final deployment."

The SDR-4000 is a 3U CompactPCI platform that is comprised of two major component level hardware products: the PRO-4600 SDR modem processing engine and the XMC-3321 dual transceiver input/output mezzanine card. RapidIO provides a high bandwidth interconnect fabric between these cards, as well as the input/output functionality to ensure the efficient use of the processing resources. Software development tools include Spectrum's quicComm hardware abstraction layer, which facilitates algorithm partitioning and programming and a real-time operating system.

Related Links
Spectrum Signal Processing