Old Crows must learn new tricks and Analog Devices’ engineers are hoping attendees of the 59th Annual AOC International Symposium & Convention fly freely into Booth #131 at the storied event. The Association of Old Crows (AOC) has long been highly regarded for its annual conference and exhibition, and Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) will be using their booth space as a demonstration area, providing system-level examples of how reduced size, weight, and power (SWaP) for aerospace & defense (A&D) systems is possible while enhancing performance. The 59th Annual AOC event is scheduled for the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC on October 25-27, 2022.
ADI is welcoming visitors to Booth #131 to see how ADI’s integrated solutions can enhance the performance and contribute to the miniaturization of A&D and military electronic systems, including communications radios, electronic warfare (EW) systems, and radar systems. Visitors are invited to watch several ongoing demonstrations each exhibition day and learn from them, by asking questions about assembly, interconnections, power consumption, in-field testing, and more. And ADI’s experts will be on hand to provide thoughtful, practical answers covering a wide range of technologies, including software defined radios (SDRs), wideband digitizers, multichannel radars, and high frequency/high-speed data converters.
The demonstrations present solutions for a variety of A&D and military electronic systems. For example, developers of EW systems faced with capturing signals over broad instantaneous bandwidths can check out a 2-to-24-GHz wideband receiver and transmitter reference design. It employs the latest RF/microwave integrated circuits (ICs) and mixed-signal ICs to provide impressive signal sensitivity over its broad bandwidth. It incorporates those reliable, high-performance devices in a simplified architecture to reduce SWaP. The layout is logical and straightforward, contributing to ease of assembly and reduced manufacturing and production test time.
Radar system designers may want to spend time at demonstrations of a wideband direct RF sampling multichannel radar receiver platform. It takes advantage of the multichip synchronizing capabilities of ADI’s high-frequency, high-speed analog-to-digital (A/D) data converters and the high stability of ADI’s model ADF4377 low-jitter wideband microwave frequency synthesizer. It uses their capabilities to form a microwave radar receiver subsystem capable of instantaneously transforming detected RF/microwave radar signals to the digital realm. By doing so, it saves frequency-conversion time as needed when operating in a hostile environment.
The ADF4377 is a new product, a highly integrated integer-N PLL with on-board voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). The synthesizer tunes from 0.8 to 12.8 GHz while the VCO covers fundamental frequencies from 6.4 to 12.8 GHz. The synthesizer noise floor at 12 GHz is -160 dBc/Hz while open-loop phase noise is -108 dBc/Hz offset 100 kHz from the carrier. The synthesizer works with reference frequencies as high as 1 GHz and includes multiple outputs to enable multiple-signal phase alignments such as in the multichannel radar receiver platform demonstrated at the 59th Annual AOC conference and exhibition.
The propensity for ADI’s engineers and devices to save SWaP and processing time with an “RF-to-bits” design approach is further illustrated with the demonstration of a 2-to-18-GHz transceiver system. It features 1-GHz-wide channels and 4.5-GHz intermediate frequency (IF) and serves as a high-performance building block for EW systems. The reference design leverages the capabilities of ADI’s Helios frequency converter, which fits four wideband receive channels and one wideband transmit channel into a hermetically sealed, single slot VITA67.3-compliant 3U VPX housing. Helios provides flexible local oscillator (LO) operation and maintains excellent phase stability versus frequency, temperature, and time.
This 2-to-18-GHz EW transceiver subsystem demonstration combines the flexibility of the Helios tuner with the performance of the model AV140 digitizer from ApisSys (www.apissys.fr). The digitizer employs mixed-signal front end (MxFE®) scalable SDR technology and is compliant with the OpenVPX standard. It is a core component for multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) EW and electronic support measures (ESM) systems, including phased array radar transceivers. The device integrates four channels of 12-b, 6 GSamples/s A/D conversion and four channels of 16-b, 6 GSamples/s digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion with a Virtex® Ultrascale+™ field programmable gate array (FPGA) for advanced processing power in A&D and military systems. It also has an on-board low-jitter reference oscillator and clock synthesizer to simplify operation.
Visitors to the ADI booth at the 59th AOC show can observe this compact EW subsystem as it captures a variety of signals across its wide bandwidth and provides almost instantaneous information about those signals. It features a client application programming interface (API) to simplify command, configuration, and control setup and programming with different systems.
These are a few examples of the ADI demonstrations running each day at Booth #131 of the 59th Annual AOC International Symposium & Convention in Washington, DC. An additional demonstration will highlight a compact SDR reference design based on ADI’s Pluto-NG device, the latest generation SDR. Along with enjoying the demonstrations, visitors can learn more about ADI’s broad range of design tools to help users optimize their devices, including ADIsimPLL for phase-lock-loop (PLL) synthesizers to simulate performance before committing to a design or circuit board layout. The AOC is annually a very worthwhile event and, with this year’s event, ADI is adding several “look-and-learn” demonstrations that may help to start or finish a challenging A&D or military electronic system design.
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