Digital receiver

Isle of Wight-based RF Engines Limited (RFEL) has been awarded a grant from the South East Development Agency to create a portable digital receiver capable of scanning the spectrum from zero up to 5.84GHz.

Typically, such devices only extend to 3 GHz, but with the expanding use of higher frequencies for WiFi, an increased frequency range is required.

The new wideband receiver is expected to find a home in commercial wireless communications applications, such as wireless base stations, as well as in test and measurement products.

RFEL also anticipates that it may also be deployed in hand-held media devices, where a reconfigurable receiver provides a more cost effective and smaller solution than a number of dedicated receiver circuits.

This is a progressive move for RFEL, which has, until now, been focussed on complex firmware intellectual property (IP) designs. For example, to date the company has provided individual IP Cores and System-Level Cores for Xilinx and Altera FPGAs intended for use in high performance radio systems, and other signal-processing based designs.