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ERS-1 satellite
Receiver technology is at the heart of all modern sensor systems and in many cases, a key driver in the determination of system perfromance.
As the requirements of military systems are ever more taxing, the technology portfolio applied to receivers must become more sophisticated. The ATC has a broad capability in receiver design, from conventional RF implementations to high speed optical sampling receivers and highly flexible firmware implementations.
Radar and EW receivers have traditionally been designed for a well defined application, and have been implemented using specialist analogue components. The board illustrated includes facilities for automatic DC correction, dither injection and digital dither removal to facilitate a high dynamic range data acquisition sub-system with excellent linearity for small signals.
The output of the SOFT receiver programme is a receiver that will support radar, communication and EW functions using a single hardware implementation. Common programmable digital hardware is used, with common parameterised firmware cores to implement receivers for the three applications. This allows the mode in which the receiver is operating to be changed from dwell to dwell.
The ATC makes use of undersampling techniques to allow direct sampling at the microwave frequency, thereby simplifying receiver architectures. The Rockwell Scientific RTH020 Track and Hold device is capable of sampling/
undersampling signals up to 10GHz, with the ADC sampling at a rate of up to 1GS/s.
Optical sampling techniques developed at the ATC enable the effective sampling rate offered by conventional electrical ADCs to be increased 16 fold. This is achieved by the use of a 1 by 16 optical commutating switch, which produces de-interleaved samples while maintaining single point sampling. The design of the optical sampler is scaleable for other data rates, electrical ADC resolutions and future developments in electrical ADCs
