New Direct-to-Digital COTS Boards Are Powered by 64 Gsps Agilex™ 9 SoC FPGA Direct RF-Series

Annapolis Micro Systems, a leading COTS board and systems supplier, offers two powerful direct-to-digital COTS products based on Altera’s Agilex™ 9 SoC FPGA Direct RF-Series.

The WILDSTAR™ SAF1 Small Form Factor Module (WSSAF1) integrates the Agilex™ 9 AGRW014 FPGA in a palm-size unit for edge applications close to the sensor and other tight envelope man-portable environments. It delivers high-performance processing and four 64 Gsps A/D and D/A channels converting at 10-bit resolution.

The WILDSTAR™ 3AE1 3U OpenVPX FPGA Processor (WB3AE1) integrates the Agilex™ 9 AGRW027 FPGA in a standard 3U VPX SOSA™-aligned Plug-In Card (PIC) form factor. The AGRW027 FPGA delivers similar performance as the AGRW014 FPGA but with double the channels: 8x transmit and 8x receive.

“By supporting much higher conversion and processing rates, these boards make it possible for customers to acquire and process adversary emissions from a wider portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, with a lower SWaP RF front end,” said Noah Donaldson, Chief Technical Officer, Annapolis Micro Systems. “Now larger swaths of the RF spectrum can be efficiently digitized, processed, and recorded at the edge.”

“Altera’s Agilex™ 9 SoC FPGAs have enabled AMS to leverage Intel’s State of the Art (SOTA) packaging technology, resulting in significant SWaP reduction in a single RF FPGA for the Defense Industrial Base at an accelerated pace,” said John Sotir, Senior Director Military, Aerospace, and Government Business Unit, Altera.

WSSAF1 includes an RF Card (WISM00) that provides analog front-end personalization and an optional Digital Card (WISD00) that provides back-end personalization. In development is an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin™ Module Card (WISD11) that adds a GPU, CPU, and deep learning and vision accelerators.