Low-Cost Scalable Ultrawideband Receiver Personality for Attritable Platforms

The Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC analog-to-digital system on chip with eight or sixteen digital channels, each sampling at 4 Gsps and higher, has provided a significant increase in the channel density and performance of software defined radios. The inclusion of the RFSoC in OpenVPX and SOSA-compliant cards is allowing VPX-based systems to implement more complex radio designs. While the RFSoC is a revolutionary leap in improving the SWaP of the digital back-end of a radio system, there is still need for a compact multi-channel RF front-end to expand the usable frequency range of the system and interface the RFSoC to antennas to ultimately send and receive RF signals. Toyon proposes using our existing receiver design capabilities to design a compact multi-channel RF personality that provides frequency coverage from 2 GHz to 18 GHz between antenna elements and the RFSoC. The RF personality will adhere to OpenVPX standards and be SOSA-compatible for integration into existing SOSA chassis. This RF personality card will support multi-card configurations to support a multi-thousand element phased array antenna. Toyon has conducted RF simulations and physical modeling of a proposed solution to this problem and has confidence that this solution can be transformed into a workable prototype.