Digital radio frequency memory synthetic instrument enhancing US navy automated test equipment mission

Abstract

This research project aims to expand the capability of a current US Navy Automated Test Equipment (ATE) family of testers known as the Consolidated Automated Support System (CASS). Industry research is now focused on breaking the historical construct of test equipment. Advances in the field of Synthetic Instruments have opened the door to test avionics in new ways. Every year new capabilities are developed using core hardware and increasingly capable software modules to create complex waveforms. This research creates a Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) Synthetic Instrument that can be programmed to perform a wide array of low latency Radio Frequency (RF) tests. Synthetic Instruments are defined as a concatenation of hardware and software modules used in combination to emulate a traditional piece of electronic instrumentation. This Synthetic Instrument couples high speed Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) to high speed Digital-to-Analog Converters (DAC) with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in between for digital signal processing. An RF front end is used to down convert the RF to baseband where it is sampled, modified, and up converted back to RF. The FPGA performs Digital Signal Processing (DSP) on the signal to achieve the desired output.