A basic explanation

For visitors to the website who are familiar with electronics design and with the various techniques of digital signal processing, then this section is not relevant. These readers are recommended to go straight to the 'Products' section.

For those readers who are not so technical (or who have already sampled the website and who are still not quite clear about what RF Engines actually does!), then this section hopefully will be of some help.

Most modern electronic systems use some sort of digital signal processing. In these advanced electronic systems (for example a radar system or a communications base station), the received analogue signal is converted into digital format for processing through the system.

The speed of this analogue to digital conversion is increasing rapidly with the progress in technology, and in particular the advances in analogue-to-digital converter 'chip technology'.

One of the major challenges for system designers lies in how to process this digital information in real-time, in such a way that no data is lost and all events occurring in the radio spectrum are identified in real-time as they occur (if ‘real-time’ is not possible then data has to be stored for subsequent processing). This ‘processing challenge’ becomes increasingly critical as these analogue-to-digital conversion rates become even faster with technological progress, and even larger sections of the spectrum need to be addressed. The term applied to this whole technology area is ‘digital signal processing’ (DSP).

This is where RF Engines specialise. The basic products that the company supplies (and on which the company holds several patents) are able to take the converted digital signal (at whatever rate or characteristic that the signal may have), and 'fine-slice' it into individual channels of the highest quality and in real-time. Nothing is missed. All events, however fleeting or fast-moving, will be detected. The effect is similar to having all radio channels tuned in and being listened to at the same time - rather than having to scan across the radio spectrum to pick out each one in turn.

The products that the company uses to meet a specific customer requirement are designed in-house - some of them are patented, others are proprietary designs - and are 'assembled' (in some cases using several products or 'cores') to achieve the desired result. The result is (using the rather overworked term) a 'System on a Chip', meaning that a whole or partial electronic system is created using these specialised cores and these are implemented on a specialised 'chip' known as an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Buying cores in this way saves customers a lot of time and expense - it would take customers many months or years to create similar functions, delaying and adding risk to a product introduction.

RFEL continues to supply these cores and system-on-chip designs, but a major part of the company’s business is also now in developing and selling finished products that incorporate these DSP techniques. These products are then either supplied direct to customers, or are supplied to the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) who then sells on to the end customer. RFEL has had many years experience in the design of complete products that include RF (radio frequency) and DSP techniques, and so have developed products including:

•	digital receivers that are able to acquire and process signals (used in communications and some military and governmental applications)
•	spectrum analysers (that are used to measure, analyse and observe signals)
•	satellite communication and basestation channelisation designs.

Hopefully this has made things a little clearer! If so then please move onto the next stage…
Click here to find out the benefits of RF Engines approach.