Redefining Radio With Software
Non-interoperability between radios is a staggering problem for the U.S. military and an even tougher dilemma for thousands of local public safety agencies lacking the benefit of central organization. Software-defined radio (SDR) is being pursued by both military contractors and electronics companies as a broad-spectrum, multi-protocol solution that employs software or software-driven silicon such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and digital signal processing (DSP) chips.
The U.S. military’s SDR overhaul of its communications infrastructure represents a lucrative opportunity for the semiconductor industry, according to Venture Development analyst Chad Hart.
David Squires of Xilinx’s DSP Center of Excellence reports that the world civilian SDR market could be equal to the international military SDR market, which should be worth twice as much as the U.S. market.
Semico Research’s Bob Merritt notes that third-generation mobile phone technology could greatly benefit from SDR, which would allow more processing power to be bundled into phones without increasing size, weight, power consumption, or cost.
Forward Concepts founder Will Strauss says the U.S. military is the only SDR market right now, while commercial wireless SDR rollouts will probably move faster than those for the fragmented public safety market.
The commercial wireless market is focusing on two products, base stations and handsets, with the former receiving greater attention from companies because SDR-enabling base stations is easier.
Solving the formidable technical challenges of SDR will hinge on the development of a dynamically reconfigurable chip and figuring out how dynamic configuration capabilities should be rationed between the software and the silicon.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) fromElectronic Business (06/04) Vol. 30, No. 6, P. 58; Testa, Bridget Mintz .
