Altera demos systems design solutions at RadarCon 2014

USA: Altera Corp. demonstrated its military radar systems solutions with FPGA-based military radar reference designs at IEEE RadarCon 2014.

In addition, Altera shared more about its latest Arria 10 FPGAs, the only programmable logic devices in the industry to include hardened floating point IEEE 754 DSP (digital signal processing) blocks, making them ideal for radar systems design.

RadarCon highlights the challenges in radar designs as the industry continues to transition from a world of analog antennas with very limited intelligence and configurability to one of digital antennas that offer a high degree of re-configurability and all of the advantages of DSP for each antenna element.

Altera engineers performed in-hardware demonstrations of radar reference designs available for customers today in Altera standard FPGA development kits and will also show the company's portfolio of FGPA, SoC, Enpirion power devices, and software tools that support radar system design.

Altera military radar reference designs include:

* Space-time adaptive processing (STAP), a signal processing technique to achieve order-of-magnitude sensitivity improvements in target detection.

* An extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm implemented in an SOC FPGA for target tracking, navigation systems, adaptive control, and many other dynamic systems.

* Time delay digital beam forming - an algorithm that provides significant advantages compared to analog beam forming including multiple simultaneous beams, instantaneous wide bandwidth and element level configurability.

* Ultra-wideband channelizer running in a productionBittware6UVPX with a signal generator feeding into a multi-Gsps Analog to Digital Converter (ADC).