TECHNOLOGY SURVEY: A SAMPLING OF FPGA BOARDS FOR EW AND SIGINT APPLICATIONS

摘要

This month's JED survey looks at Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) boards for electronic warfare (EW) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) applications. With the ever-increasing use of FPGAs to simplify system design, many companies provide multifunction FPGA boards in typical Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) form factors. These COTS boards are being used frequently in EW systems due to their wide availability, programmability and versatility. Before discussing complete FPGA boards though, let's take a closer look at FPGAs. An FPGA is a semiconductor chip that contains many programmable logic components that can be interconnected as needed by the EW system designer to perform whatever function is needed. These programmable logic components can either be Configurable Logic Blocks (CLBs) or Logic Array Blocks (LABs). CLBs are the basic building blocks of an FPGA. A simple diagram of an early CLB is shown in Figure 1. By combining groups of CLBs, a set of logic functions can be created to generate a desired output. The switches between each CLB determine what inputs are used and where outputs are sent.