Electromagnetic spectrum, military communications focus of AMD’s Versal RF series
NewsDecember 12, 2024
61st AOC INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM & CONVENTION, NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. Engineers at AMD in Santa Clara, California, looking to bring digital signal-processing performance as close the antenna as possible, announced the launch of the Versal RF series, which has high compute performance in a single-chip device with integrated direct RF-sampling data converters. The announcement was made at the AOC International Symposium in National Harbor, Maryland, this week.
In defense applications, the RF spectrum is becoming more and more complex and more and more congested, says Manuel Uhm, Director Versal Product Management & Marketing, Adaptive & Embedded Computing Group, AMD. “The problem is not new, but the complexity has started to increase exponentially. So what you see now is an environment where many, many signals are vying to get through the noise. The importance right now is to have equipment to identify and analyze signals in the congested spectrum and also have support for higher frequency range because as you move from communicating not just by voice, but also through video and imagery, you need to be able to support that video and imagery being sent, so you need higher frequency rates, higher sample rates, and the compute [power] to process that video and imagery. You also need frequency agility and need to move within the spectrum to maintain comms and keep assets coordinated.”
It's important to do “digital signal processing as close to the antenna, or what we call the RF edge, as possible,” Uhm notes. “These systems have to be able to do all the sorting analyzing, identifying. and classifying at very low latency in real time.” The ability have DSP as close to antenna as possible is what enables real-time performance, he adds.
The performance of the new AMD solution fits with the military’s demand for more and more actionable data and intelligence delivered at high speed. The Versal RF enables users to leverage more raw bandwidth to get more data in one gulp than previous systems, says David Brubaker, Senior Product Line Manager, Adaptive & Embedded Computing Group, AMD. Its wide spectrum observability enables it to capture a lot of data and figure out what to do with the data very quickly, he adds.
AMD Graphic from press briefing.
The new series enables simultaneous capture and analysis of wideband spectrum with high-resolution, multichannel RF converters and low-latency processing. The monolithically integrated, high-resolution (14-bit with calibration), 32 gigasamples-per-second (GSPS), 18 GHz RF analog-to-digital converters (RF-ADCs) enable accurate, flexible, and fast signal characterization and analysis across a wide observable spectrum for mission critical applications such as phased-array radar, electromagnetic spectrum operations, signals intelligence, and military and satellite communications terminals, company officials say.
The series is a heterogeneous computing solution that combines high-resolution RF data converters, hard IP DSP compute blocks and AI [artificial intelligence] engines for DSP, along with adaptive system-on-chip (SoC) programmable logic and an Arm subsystem in a monolithically integrated, single-chip device.
Test and measurement applications
AMD leaders also see the Versal RF being leveraged for test-and-measurement applications such as high-speed oscilloscopes and wideband spectrum analyzers and generators: The Versal RF Series provides a highly integrated solution with multiple RF channels up to Ku band and enables advanced test-and-measurement signal-processing functions such as arbitrary resampling and spectral analysis. Direct RF sampling up to 18 GHz and as many as 32 GSPS enable multi-GHz of RF bandwidth to be digitized on multiple channels simultaneously.
DSP computation
The Versal RF Series delivers up to 80 TOPS of DSP compute with up to 19 times more DSP compute -- 4 in channelizer mode -- compared to the current-generation AMD Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC device. Select DSP functions are implemented in dedicated hard IP blocks, including 4 GSPS FFT/iFFT, channelizer, polyphase arbitrary resampler, and LDPC decoder, reducing dynamic power consumption by as much as 80% compared to an AMD soft logic implementation.
Key DSP functions implemented in dedicated IP blocks deliver power and area savings compared to soft -ogic implementations and enable more compute in the same physical area to meet constrained form-factor requirements. The total DSP compute provided by the top-of-stack Versal RF Series devices would require multiple FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays] for an equivalent computing solution. The amount of programmable logic required to meet processing requirements is also minimized, further reducing size and weight.
Versal RF Series development tools are available now. Silicon samples and evaluation kits are expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2025, with production shipments expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
