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 RFEL : Why Choose RFEL
 
         
RFEL’s Design approach

Systems Experience

RFEL is a signal processing design company with a strong background in system and sub-system design work.

The company is therefore able to offer a unique range of services: from individual signal processing IP cores and system-on-chip designs, through to complete system design solutions supplied on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) boards.

The company can view the design challenge from the perspective of the system designer, and regularly works in collaboration with the designer (wherever individual project circumstances allow this) in order to work out the optimum solution to meet or exceed the needs of the overall system. This system experience invariably results in the most relevant and cost effective solution being identified.

The RFEL design team come from a varied background of defence, communications and instrumentation specialisms, and therefore understand the practical design issues involved, and the need for solutions that push the technology to the limit, but commensurate with minimising risk. In short, the designers have experienced it from the 'other side'!

Product capability

The company specialises in 'top-end' high performance signal processing designs,
RFEL have developed, and are continuing to add to, a portfolio of standard and special designs (or cores), see the 'Products' section. Some of these designs use proprietary techniques on which RFEL hold patents, and utilise other more standard advanced signal processing techniques that are optimised for maximum efficiency. The company is familiar with working with all the leading device vendors.

All the company's products are modelled before delivery, and supplied with full documentation / testbenches etc.

Systems capability

The company's overall system design service is flexible and typically incorporates design considerations including the complete system frequency plan, analogue to digital converter device selection, board options, down conversion, system tuning and the filtering requirements. In short, all the system issues are considered to ensure the channelisation design is optimised to achieve minimum silicon usage.

Partitioning of the FPGA and DSP functionality (an increasingly contentious issue) is also considered, as well as the application processing, which may include averaging, interference detection and cancellation, and demodulation. These and other design considerations are covered in the 'System Design Solutions' section.

The company is able to implement the designs on COTS boards or on their own high specification board designs, as required by the project.

Benefits

RFEL's core architectures are both a disruptive and a creative technology, insofar as they are not a simple enhancement to current techniques but are a quantum step forward in signal processing techniques. The use of RFEL's technology provides the opportunity for more radical and imaginative design decisions.

The RFEL designs achieve processing speeds of up to 30 times that of other architectures, with consequent cost savings in silicon, hardware device count, and at the product level, reduced manufacturing cost and time to market.

In short, the RFEL cores provide significant opportunities to utilise standard IP blocks and reduce system design time, for complex signal processing applications.

Commercial and Governmental disclosure restrictions prevent design case studies being covered in detail, however by way of example, in the first of the two most recent design projects, the RFEL design has reduced the bill-of-materials per board by $2000 for a project where over 2500 boards will be produced. In the second project, the RFEL design has enabled over 80 racks of hardware to be reduced to only a single rack.