Burlington, MA (PRWEB) September 16, 2004
PrismTech, a leading provider of distributed and wireless software infrastructure, today announced the release of their new whitepaper “The Significance of Object Middleware on Digital Signal Processors for Software-Defined Radio Developers – Enabling Portability and Interoperability for Waveforms, Applications and Software Platforms across Heterogeneous Hardware Devices.”
Software-Defined Radio (SDR) application developers want to increasingly exploit the performance and power potential of different combinations of digital signal processors (DSPs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and general purpose processors (GPPs). For example, by harnessing the benefits of the new generation of programmable signal-processing devices, SDR developers believe they can build a wide range of small form-factor, low-power, highly efficient, (re)configurable and lower cost radio frequency (RF) solutions which use a minimum of frequency-specific components.
To facilitate this goal, industry experts working in the field of SCA-based (Software Communications Architecture) SDR solutions believe that object (CORBA) middleware running on a DSP provides these SDR developers with a number of significant benefits. These include:
The ability to optimize the power consumption profile in battery-operated devices; as tasks can be allocated/balanced for maximum efficiency between the GPP(s) and DSP(s).
Lower costs, as design decisions that previously locked radio developers into high-cost implementations and test cycles may now be revisited and revised “on the fly”.
Fault-resilient CORBA features enable a more robust and resilient SDR capable of operating in harsher and more constrained conditions, even if at reduced capacity.
Acceptance testing and hence delivery time is reduced due to easier (re)configuration.
Traditional thinking suggested that due to the nature of a DSP’s highly restricted environment it was not possible to run CORBA on a DSP, and thus, until now, CORBA has only been widely deployed in GPP-based environments.
This whitepaper describes a major breakthrough that has produced a “C” object request broker (ORB), OpenFusion e*ORB SDR, for classes of DSP and low-cost microcontrollers. The whitepaper explains how this opens the door to achieving greater degrees of portability and interoperability for waveforms, other wireless applications and any SDR software platform or operating environment (SDR OE) over a wide range of radio hardware platforms. Finally, the whitepaper details some of the key criteria and qualities of the object middleware (ORB) that are needed to create an ideal SDR OE, i.e. a software platform for SDR applications that maximizes efficiency by requiring the minimum number of CPU instructions per kB of data marshaled.
The whitepaper is available from PrismTech’s website at http://www.prismtechnologies.com.
About PrismTech
Founded in 1992, with offices in the USA and Europe, PrismTech is a privately held software products company. PrismTech serves international Fortune 500 customers in the telecommunications, data communications, defense and aerospace sectors. PrismTech is an acknowledged leader in distributed and wireless software infrastructure, with solutions ranging from wide-scale integration to embedded real-time systems, supporting applications from operations support systems (OSS) through to software-defined radio (SDR). For additional information about PrismTech, visit the web site at http://www.prismtechnologies.com.
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