The Quad-MxFE System Development Platform contains four MxFE™ software defined, direct RF sampling transceivers, as well as associated RF front-ends, clocking, and power circuitry. The target application is phased array radars, electronic warfare, and ground-based SATCOM, specifically a 16 transmit/16 receive channel direct sampling phased array at L/S/C band (0.1 GHz to ~5GHz). The Rx & Tx RF front-end has drop-in configurations that allow for customized frequency ranges, depending on the user’s application.

The Quad-MxFE System Development Platform highlights a complete system solution. It is intended as a testbed for demonstrating multi-chip synchronization as well as the implementation of system level calibrations, beamforming algorithms, and other signal processing algorithms. The system is designed to mate with a VCU118 Evaluation Board from Xilinx®, which features the Virtex® UltraScale+™ XCVU9P FPGA, with provided reference software, HDL code, and MATLAB system-level interfacing.

In addition to the Quad-MxFE Digitizing Card, the kit also contains a 16Tx / 16Rx Calibration Board that is used to develop system-level calibration algorithms, or otherwise more easily demonstrate power-up phase determinism in situations pertinent to their own use case. The Calibration Board also allows the user to demonstrate combined-channel dynamic range, spurious, and phase noise improvements and can also be controlled via a free MATLAB add-on when connected to the PMOD interface of the VCU118.

The system can be used to enable quick time-to-market development programs for applications like: