Virtual Lab

Laboratory

Prototyping

PCBA prototyping equipment. A pick and place machine and a small reflow oven provide the capability to quickly execute prototype PCBA boards with components as small as 04-02. PCB's can be ordered in small batches from European suppliers and manual operations such a curing, potting and conformal coating can be executed in-house
Controlled linear and circular movement rail. A programmable, computer controlled rail provides circular and linear movement for range and range rate testing. The accuracy is sub mm for linear displacement for a length pf 2m and sub 1 deg. for circular movement with 360 deg. capability
FPGA development kit. For prototyping of FPGA systems CDS has at its disposal a full Xilinx ZCU102 Ultrascale+ development kit, which includes the ZCU102 development board, the AD-FMCOMMS5 analog RF front-end from ADI and the STAR-Dundee FMC SpW/SpaceFibre board
Wireless systems prototyping

The National Instruments (NI) infrastructure available at IntraSAT-Tech allows rapid wireless system prototyping. The SDR NI USRP modules combined with LabVIEW provide a flexible, cost-effective development platform that supports the implementation of a reconfigurable RF frontend composed of multiple synchronized Tx/Rx modules. The platform can be used for the development and testing of various algorithms and system architectures, allowing the customization of the solution to meet the application requirements. The NI testbed includes:

  • 8 NI USRPs, model 2954R (10MHz - 6GHz, up to 160MHz instantaneous BW, up to 200MS/s).
  • An NI PXIe-8880 controller (16 core Intel (Xeon) CPU processor @2.3GHz, 24GB RAM).
  • A synchronization subsystem (an NI CDA-2990 Octoclock and a USRP N2900).
  • The NI LabVIEW Communication System Design Suite 2.0 and MIMO Application Framework that can be integrated with MATLAB for complementary signal processing.