Plextek Ltd - Programmable Logic Applications

Plextek's electronics design services include:FPGA design, ESCAN Radar, MMIC design, GPRS design, Communications product design, Microwave design Defence electronics, Electronic product design, RF design, DSP design, Telemetry system, System Integration,Communications system design, Due diligence

Programmable Logic Applications

Programmable logic has an important place in the modern market place. We have found that most of our application areas fall within the scope of products that are so complex that a certain amount of tuning and evolution during development, and potentially throughout the life of the product is required. In particular, areas where there are emerging standards, low to mid volume production, or where a very high degree of flexibility is required, are prime targets for programmable logic.

The days of programmable logic being used solely for glue have long passed. Today's silicon is capable of very high performance digital signal processing (DSP) and system on chip (SOC) solutions, or in the programmable domain, system on programmable chip (SOPC).

The trend in modern silicon FPGA devices is to include hard slices to provide high performance yet compact dedicated functions. These functions include DSP optomised blocks such as multipliers, Dual Port RAM, and even microprocessor cores such as PowerPC or ARM.

Programmable logic based designs provide opportunities to manage component obsolescence by capturing the functional design in high level standards based languages, such as VHDL or Verilog. Designs can, in many cases, be silicon independent, allowing the design to be readily migrated should the need arise.

In the equipment (picture above) an FPGA is being used to supplement a standard DSP processor in part of a our race winning F1 telemetry system. The FPGA implements:

Digital GMSK modulation

Direct Digital Synthesis of the IF from complex IQ

Mix of digital IF to complex IQ

A communications link between the DSP and communications processors

Interfaces to audio and RF peripherals

We have used our advanced techniques to implement a wide range of applications, including

Digital (Software) Radio

Direct Digital Synthesis, DDS

Filters. FIRs, IIRs

Forward Error Correction, FEC

Coders/Decoders, Codecs

Modulators/Demodulators, Modems (upto QAM 64)

Radar Digital Signal Processing, DSP

IFF Transponder Signal Processing

CCD imaging

Much of this experience has been gained by implementing a wide range of communication, medical, radar and scientific applications.

As you will have gathered, most (but not all) of applications have a telecommunications slant, however, we take great delight in developing for custom requirements. Please contact us with your requirements.

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