RF Engines contracted to supply signal processing cores to leading mobile telecommunications company

March 16, 2005 -- RF Engines Limited (RFEL), the provider of high performance solutions for FPGA, has recently signed a contract with one of the leading mobile communications companies, to supply high speed signal processing cores.  The company in question, which prefers not to be named at this point, is incorporating the cores in its research and development programme.  The RFEL designs are based on the high specification Matrix range of mixed radix Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) cores, which are being integrated to produce a non-power-of-two filter bank.  Precise details of the design cannot be released at this time.

John Summers, RFEL’s VP Sales and Business Development, stated, “We are obviously pleased to be supplying such a prestigious client with specialist designs, in support of its advanced technology programme, and we look forward to continuing to develop the relationship.”

The Matrix family of core designs are built around a set of different prime length DFT (Discrete Fourier Transform) cores.  When these different cores are combined, they allow non ‘power-of-two’ FFTs to be configured that exactly match the number of points required for the application.   This offers greater flexibility over the standard FFT algorithm, which is limited to power-of-two lengths.

As an example, in a recent design that required 1872 channels to be precisely extracted from a spectrum bandwidth in excess of 40MHz, 2-point, 3-point and 13-point DFT cores were integrated to produce this exact length FFT.  A simple 2048 point FFT would not have been able to meet the channel spacing and sample rate requirements for this application.  The design fitted comfortably within a Xilinx Virtex Pro50 FPGA with room to spare.

The building blocks are supplied as intellectual property (IP) components for system-on-programmable-chip designers, and are fully supported by bit-true simulation models.  They are ideal for applications such as wireless communications nodes, medical instrumentation, radar, sonar, electronic surveillance, test instrumentation, real-time spectral analysis and satellite communications receivers.

RF Engines

RF Engines Limited is a UK based design company, providing high specification signal processing cores, system on chip designs, and FPGA based board solutions for applications in the defence, communications and instrumentation markets.  These applications include wireless and wire-line communications systems, satellite communications systems, test instrumentation, and defence systems.   Into these markets, RF Engines provides a range of industry leading FPGA cores covering standard signal processing techniques such as FFT and digital filtering, as well as solutions for projects requiring complex real time channelisation.  The company also provides system design services for specialist applications.
 
For further information, please see the website at www.rfel.com or contact RF Engines at Innovation Centre, St Cross Business Park, Newport, Isle of Wight, PO30 5WB, Great Britain. Tel +44 (0) 1983 550330.