Virtex-6 FPGA powers Pentek VITA 49 Radio Transport Standard CompactPCI/AMC/PCIe/VPX Modules for SDR

by Steve Leibson - Xcell Daily Blog - Xilinx, Feb. 10, 2016 – 

The Pentek Cobalt 71664 is the latest in a series of CompactPCI, AMC, PCIe, VPX Modules that are multichannel, 200MHz, 16-bit A/D modules conforming to the VITA 49 Radio Transport Standard for SDR (software-defined radio) applications. The VITA 49 transport protocol conveys time-stamped signal data and meta-data in packetized form, providing an interoperability framework for interfacing RF sensors (radio receivers and transmitters) to processing resources. Prior to the development of the VITA 49 standard, each SDR receiver manufacturer developed custom and proprietary digitized data formats and meta-data formats that made interoperability of data from different receivers impossible, which made life-cycle support of radio architectures problematic.

Each module in the Pentek Cobalt series features four programmable, multiband DDCs (digital down converters) based on the Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA. The FPGA also gives the board its I/O flexibility, which allows Pentek to easily adapt it to multiple host-bus protocols.

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