Broadband 0.1 – 18 GHz Transceiver

Working under DARPA's Digital RF Battlespace Emulator (DRBE) program we designed, tested, and delivered an ultra-wideband Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver to interface with a Real-Time High-Performance Computing (RT-HPC) to create the world's first, large scale, virtual RF environment for developing, training, and testing advanced RF systems. The transceiver module works in conjunction with the RT-HPC and Xilinx's Zynq UltraSCALE+ family of processors to both generate and receive complex waveforms to create a high-fidelity and very low latency RF test environment. The first generation of the RF transceiver has a 0.1 – 18 GHz overall Bandwidth (BW) with a 1 GHz Instantaneous Bandwidth (IBW). The outputs of the transmitter and receiver signal paths are designed to accommodate a wide range of Systems Under Test (SUT), varying signal amplitudes, while also maintaining high Spur Free Dynamic Range (SFDR). After testing and delivering the firstgeneration systems, we are currently developing the second generation of hardware aimed at increasing the IBW to 2 GHz and drastically lowering the Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) requirements of the transceiver to enable DRBE to interface with an ever-increasing amount of SUTs simultaneously.