Annapolis Micro Systems, a leading FPGA board and systems supplier, and Epiq Solutions, experts in low-power reconfigurable radio solutions, have collaborated to offer an OpenVPX assembly that marries Epiq Solutions’ Sidekiq™ RF transceiver card with Annapolis’ WILDSTAR™ FPGA baseboard.
This software defined radio (SDR) solution delivers high performance, flexibility, and scalability in a compact package, for the development of low-SWaP avionics, EW/EA, and signal intelligence applications and systems.
Sidekiq X2 and X4 cards provide up to four phase-coherent RF transceivers covering 1 MHz to 6 GHz, all within a VITA 57.1 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) form factor. RF performance is enhanced with 16-bit A/D converters and 14-bit D/A converters.
The Sidekiq cards are compatible with any Annapolis WILDSTAR baseboard with a WILD™ FMC+ (WFMC+™) slot, which now includes six 3U boards and four 6U boards. WILDSTAR boards integrate the highest-performing Intel and Xilinx FPGAs, including Virtex® UltraScale+™, Zynq® UltraScale+ MPSoC, and Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC, and are available in either convection- or conduction-cooled configurations.
“The ease of marrying these two boards is a validation of the interoperability and scalability of the WILD OpenVPX EcoSystem we have developed,” said Noah Donaldson, Annapolis Micro Systems Chief Technology Officer. “It proves you can achieve high performance while maintaining openness and commonality.”
“Our Sidekiq family of software defined radios have played an integral part in many SWaP-optimized radio solutions where our customers need to get their products deployed quickly while maintaining performance, flexibility, and open standards in their solution,” stated John Orlando, CEO at Epiq Solutions. "We are excited to be collaborating with Annapolis Micro Systems to further broaden our portfolio of software defined radios with a turnkey multi-channel high performance radio solution supporting OpenVPX and our Sidekiq software/FPGA reference design.”
To facilitate application development, a Sidekiq VPX Platform Development Kit (PDK) provides a complete development environment. Design and integrate your own software applications and FPGA processing blocks on top of standard reference designs and an open API.
The integrated assembly and associated PDK reduces development times and improves wideband versatility and performance for many complex RF applications, including:
- Satellite Communications
- Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM)
- EW/EA Systems
- Wideband RF Record and Playback
- Spectrum Monitoring
- 5G Cellular Systems
- 802.11 AC/AX Systems
- Direction Finding