Brochure

Transferring technology from
the storefront to the battlefront.
Rugged applications have benefited tremendously
from advances made in ordinary consumer devices.
RADIO AND RADAR
COTS signal processing silicon has made
dramatic advances in the last few decades
due to the explosive growth of technolo-
gies in the consumer marketplace. As a
global rugged COTS provider, we have
exploited many of these technologies in
order to provide system integrators with
board level components.
This has allowed them to design very high
performance radar and radio systems such
as small yet extremely capable tactical
radios (SDR); mobile signals intelligence;
spectrum monitoring; airborne, maritime
and fixed radar systems; RF Test & Mea-
surement and UAV/UUV telemetry systems.
Detecting Improvised
Explosive Devices
The ICS-8552B rugged
IF receiver is used in a
spectrum monitoring
application to detect
and locate IEDs, which
can be detonated with
garage door openers, handheld PCS radios
and cell phones. The range of frequencies is
so wide that the spectrum must be repeat-
edly scanned to provide coverage.
A tunable analog front end shifts signals
from the low GHz to an intermediate fre-
quency (IF) of 70MHz. The IF is directly digi-
tized by the ICS-8552B, providing a usable
instantaneous bandwidth of 40MHz. This 40
MHz slice of spectrum is passed back to the
host processor, which looks for signals of
interest that can be interrogated using the
narrowband tuner ASICs on the card. The
dual data path memory architecture of the
ICS-8552B permits concurrent acquisition
of the wideband and narrowband signals.
This allows close inspection of interesting
signals and wideband spectrum scanning
to occur simultaneously.
Spectrum Monitoring
In applications such as
spectrum monitoring,
bands of interest may be
several GHz wide, which
exceeds the capabili-
ties of even the fastest
sampling converters. In this situation, the
re-tuning speed of the analog front end
can become the factor limiting system
performance. While front end re-tuning
cannot be eliminated, using a high sample
rate ADC to maximize instantaneous band-
width can greatly reduce the frequency of
front end adjustments.
For example, the 4-channel ICS-1556 digital
receiver features a very high sampling rate
of up to 400 MHz per channel, and very
high resolution of 14 bits—a combination
that offers unsurpassed performance for
spectrum monitoring applications.