Advanced digital radar systems that can detect targets in complex, high-clutter environments are essential for mission-critical operations such as defense, search and rescue, and offshore security. Digital radar systems provide activity monitoring, target detection and classification, guidance, and encroachment notification. Additionally, active electronically scanned (AESA) phased array digital radar systems, which reinforce antenna signals in desired directions and suppress them in others, can perform search, track, and guidance functions for scores of simultaneous targets.

New Wave Design offers radar interface card hardware compatible with XMC, VPX, PCIe, and PXIe form factors. Leave the details of the interface to New Wave Design, let your team focus on the design of the radar itself. The best part is the hardware’s protocol IP is customizable, allowing end-users to add their own hardware-based processing to the radar interface card, reducing processor burden and latency while increasing determinism.

User Customization

Give your system architect more tools for radar data processing. New Wave Design IP cores such as sFPDP and FC-AE-RDMA can include a user sandbox area, between the protocol engine, and the DMA engine. The protocol engine provides a generic packet bus to the sandbox where users can add their own RTL to pre-process data. The user–modified data is provided to the DMA engine, and ultimately seamlessly provided via New Wave Design supplied software drivers to user-space in host memory. New Wave offers rich OS support for drivers and friendly customer service to help end users complete their design.

The New Wave Design V1161 offers an equivalent user modifiable solution for Ethernet/RoCEv2. The V1161 offers a Mellanox^® ConnectX^®-5 paired with a Xilinx^® Versal^® FPGA. The end user can use the FPGA as a “bump in the wire” to intercept and modify radar data prior to passing off to the ConnectX^®-5. The end user can also use the ConnectX^®-5 to directly receive radar data, then pass this data off to the FPGA via a peer-direct DMA transfer. The FPGA can then operate on radar data payload, and pass the modified data from the FPGA to the host processor via another peer-direct DMA transfer.

User modifiable RTL logic is a very powerful tool for system architects. A variety of pre-processing can be completed in the interface card such as down-sampling, area focus, and frequency analysis. This technique can unburden the processor from these tasks. In down-sampling and other data reduction techniques, it has the added bonus of enabling line rate bandwidth interfaces while still reducing PCIe link bandwidth, eliminating a difficult system bottleneck.

Key Features of Radar Interface Card Hardware

New Wave Design’s powerful, high-density FPGA-based card designs offer high bandwidth, low latency, highly deterministic interfaces that can be customized by end users. This reduces processor burden and provides a highly repeatable platform for both test and measurement and embedded applications all while allowing end users to add their own hardware based processing to the design.

Benefits of Network Emulation Hardware

• High-density FPGA-based XMC/VPX cards
• Powerful development framework for critical applications and test stands
• Hardware offload based designs providing minimum latency and maximum determinism
• Provides high-bandwidth secure protocol communications
• Supports real-time data streaming directly from sensors
• Adapts with evolving application requirements providing a technology contingency plan
• Mitigate obsolescence using FPGA-based designs, portable to future FPGA technology
• Supports Ethernet, Fibre Channel, sFPDP — Contact us for other protocol testing