RF Engines’ SpectraView™ SV900 system is being developed to provide a complete and cost-effective solution for performing real-time spectral analysis of very wideband analog signals. The SV900 is based around the latest high performance digitisers and powerful signal processing hardware, and can be interfaced directly to a standard personal computer. The package includes Advanced Signal Display Software (ASDS), a full-featured PC application that provides the user interface to the analysis system, with a variety of mechanisms for displaying, analysing and storing both time and frequency domain data.

Wideband
The SV900 platform currently achieves the widest analysis bandwidth of all RF Engines’ solutions with a useable instantaneous analysis bandwidth of 900MHz. The minimum frequency bin spacing is 30.5 kHz with a choice of resolution bandwidths depending on window selection and FFT length.

Flexible
Use of an FPGA based platform means that the system can be customised to perform specialist real-time measurement and analysis functions on the input signal. Custom FPGA code development is possible, or alternatively RF Engines offer complete turnkey design services for additional features such as frequency measurement and data demodulation. Users are also free to develop their own PC applications that interface with the real-time system using the supplied DLL library.

Hardware requirements The hardware platform is based around the AC240 platform manufactured by Acqiris. This platform includes a high-speed digitiser system with two 1GSps analogue to digital converters (ADCs) that can be combined to produce a single 2GSps stream. The hardware is also equipped with a large Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that provides the processing power for the RFEL signal processing cores. Other similar hardware platforms could be utilised to provide comparable performance.

Signal Processing Core
The figure below shows a simplified top-level architecture of the FPGA signal-processing core that performs the real-time spectral analysis function


Basic block diagram of SpectraView 900 FPGA Core

Advanced Signal Display Software
The Advanced Signal Display System (ASDS) provides the user interface to the system, and is common to all SpectraView systems. The software is a standard Windows based application.

ASDS provides two main display windows. The first is a standard power versus frequency plot of the data in either log or linear format. The second is a Power versus frequency versus time "waterfall" style plot. Each of these plots provides many extra controls like zooming, markers and colour selection. The colour manipulation facility on the waterfall plot is especially useful for visualising low-level spurious effects in the spectrum.

Features

• Cost-effective spectral analysis solution
• Extremely wideband analysis capabilities
• Minimal setup and configuration
• Range of signal display options, including log-power, waterfall, complex I/Q
• FPGA based signal processing enables a future upgrade potential
• Range of triggering options including external, wideband and narrow band triggers
• Data storage and accumulation facilityCustom PC applications with supplied DLL

Applications

• RF test and measurement
• Radio astronomy 
• RADAR and signals intelligence 
• Spectral monitoring systems 
• Scientific and medical signal analysis 
• UWB 
• Optical systems 
• Spectrometer applications