UAS Continuous Time Spectrum Situational Awareness

Continuous-time digital signal processing (CT-DSP) is a promising approach for high-speed, low size-weight-and-power (SWaP)sensor signal processing in the next generation of UASs and other SWaP-constrained environments. The idea behind CT-DSP,in comparison to traditional DSP approaches, is that the digitized signal is processed without sampling; that is, the signal isprocessed only when the input or intermediate signals change. Because of this, CT-DSP is also known as event-driven  processing, in which events are captured when the input (or internal) signal crosses a threshold between levels. Standard DSPfiltering operations are accomplished by performing arithmetic on time-delayed versions of the input signals to construct afilter of the desired properties, e.g., bandpass or bandstop at desired cutoff frequencies. Due to the lack of sampling, signalsfiltered by CT-DSP do not suffer from aliasing, and CT-DSP designs can lower power consumption compared to standardsynchronous DSP designs because arithmetic operations are only executed after events rather than at every clock cycle. Thisproject intends to build prototype hardware based on CT-DSP principles to reduce the price and power consumption ofwideband digital receivers for UAS applications.