November 8, 2022 – For the first time ever, WSR will be applying our remote sensing capabilities in the medical field. We were recently awarded a contract to design and prototype a digital subsystem for a novel medical device. Unfortunately, we can’t disclose much more than that at the request of our confidential customer, but it’s exciting to use our digital radar tech in new and interesting ways!
Also, this picture is just a stock photo and has nothing to do with what we’re building 🙂
We’re excited to have passed the preliminary design review (PDR) milestone in our work developing the digital subsystem to run Aloft Sensing, Inc.‘s embedded PNT algorithm. Now it’s time to start implementing!
In phase 1, we’ll build out the signal processing FPGA firmware, validating it first through simulation and then running on evaluation hardware. After that, we’ll design custom hardware.
This effort is funded under NASA’s Decadal Survey Incubator (DSI) Program with the overall objective of developing, implementing, and demonstrating a hardware module that captures and digitally processes radar pulses to establish the precise relative positioning and timing of a sensor within a distributed sensing architecture such that coherent image alignment for interferometrics can readily occur and high-quality products can be achieved.
You can learn more about the objectives in the award announcement from NASAÂ and by following our partner in the program Aloft Sensing.
The Job: Wide Swath Research, LLC was awarded a contract to design, manufacture and deliver a digital subsystem for the Gas and Ice Spectrometer Radar (GAISR) program led by Dr. Ken Cooper of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This 10 month contract included hardware, firmware and software development.
This was a custom development from the ground up, created to the specifications provided by JPL and optimized to minimize package footprint and power consumption, to use parts compatible with the demands for a future space flight revision and to accommodate their pre-existing digital signal processing payload.
The digital subsystem is an FPGA-based, multi-channel data conversion and processing unit controlled via PC. The hardware block diagram and picture of the final delivery is shown below.
The firmware interfaced with the desktop software and controlled all onboard hardware including: arbitrary waveform transmission, buffering ADC data, high speed ethernet communication and user defined general purpose i/o. All hooks were provided for the customer to plug their DSP payload. A high level block diagram of the firmware is provided below.
The software was a cross platform suite of tools for digital subsystem control, real time data recording and a heads up display of recorded data. The software also provided a scripting engine for repeatability of complex configurations.
The Job: Wide Swath Research, LLC was awarded a contract to design, manufacture and deliver a digital subsystem for the 3CPR cloud precipitation radar program led by Dr. Mauricio Sanchez of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
This FPGA-based subsystem provided timing, control and power to Ku-band phased array modules, collected telemetry and was designed to interface with the customer’s legacy desktop control system.
The firmware facilitated beam table loading as well as command and control via desktop software to precisely configure and control the customer’s phased array modules.
