Modern warfare in urban and mountainous environments depends heavily upon situational awareness. Combat personnel in the air, at sea, and on the ground need to monitor their surrounding environments and identify threats as soon as possible. State-of-the-art military sensors must process vast amounts of data to provide “actionable intelligence” as rapidly as possible. This requires high processing rates (in GMACS and GFLOPs), high-speed transceivers for system bandwidth, power vs. performance design flexibility, and a robust design flow to meet modern weapon system demands.

High-speed signal processing is critical to the function of advanced sensor systems. To meet the demands of radar and sensor system designs, Altera offers digital signal processing (DSP) power in its high-density Stratix^® series FPGAs and HardCopy^® series ASICs.

Figure 1. Sensor Array Block Diagram

Altera's 28-nm Stratix V FPGAs can address the unique design requirements of radar and advanced sensor technologies. With 825-Gbps full-duplex serial transceiver bandwidth, large DSP counts, excellent signal integrity, highly scalable embedded processing blocks, and logic density leadership up to 1,100K logic elements (LEs), Stratix V FPGAs offer true system-on-programmable-chip (SOPC) possibilities for military sensor designs.

Stratix V FPGAs provide the following advantages for radar and sensor applications:

• Variable-precision digital signal processing (DSP) architecture, offering native 27x27 multipliers and 64-bit accumulators (See Figure 2)
• Efficient hardware support and IP cores for floating-point implementations
• Industry-leading transceivers with an option delivering speeds up to 28-Gbps chip-to-chip data rates
• Industry-leading logic, memory, and DSP density
• User-friendly partial reconfiguration, over large or small portions of the FPGA
• Automatic single event upset (SEU) detection and correction
• Programmable Power Technology, to automatically reduce power consumption where performance requirements allow 
• Design security and anti-tamper features, including government-approved Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption
• High-productivity Simulink design flow, with fMAX and latency-constrained synthesis of optimized register transfer level (RTL)
• Seamless migration to HardCopy ASICs for power and performance enhancements 

Figure 2. Variable-Precision DSP Block Architectures 

Prototype on FPGA, Ship on ASIC

With 28-nm HardCopy V ASICs with high-speed transceivers, you have more options for high-speed logic. Design, prototype, and test using Stratix V transceiver FPGAs. When you're ready for production, migrate your design to HardCopy V transceiver ASICs. HardCopy V ASICs can reduce power by up to 50 percent, increase  performance, and enhance SEU immunity in your system. Transitioning from FPGA to ASIC, using Altera’s design flow, costs less than 20 percent of traditional ASIC design and requires no additional design tools outside of Quartus® II software.

Related Links

• Optimizing Radar and Advanced Sensor Functions with FPGAs White Paper (PDF)
• Stratix V FPGAs
• HardCopy V ASICs
• DSP Solutions
• DSP Builder and Simulink
• Transceiver Portfolio
• SOPC Builder for Design Productivity
• Military Risk and Productivity
• Article: FPGA Signal Processing for Radar/Sonar Applications