Spectrum Signal Processing to Support the U.S. Navy Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Spectrum Signal Processing Inc., a subsidiary of Spectrum Signal Processing Inc. announced that the Government Communications Systems Division of Harris Corporation has selected Spectrum's flexComm SDR-4000 rugged software defined radio (SDR) solution to be deployed in field trials of the United States Navy's Multi-Mission Unmanned Surface Vehicles (MMUSV). Under the agreement, Spectrum will supply the signal processing system onboard the MMUSV that communicates with a processing system aboard a Littoral Combat Ship.

Field trials for the MMUSV are scheduled to begin in early 2007. The MMUSV, a vessel similar to a rigid inflatable boat, is one of the mission modules that can launch from a Littoral Combat Ship. It is designed to operate autonomously and thereby protect boat operators from threats and attacks including extreme environmental conditions and hazardous electromagnetic attack. The MMUSV can be configured to support several different types of missions such as side scanning sonar data collection, weapons missions, anti-submarine warfare or surface ship warfare. Each of these missions will require a different type of data to be collected and communicated to the Littoral Combat Ship. Spectrum's SDR-4000 will be used to enable the transmission of these different data types.

Spectrum's SDR-4000 is a 3U CompactPCI subsystem that is comprised of two major component level hardware products: the PRO-4600 SDR modem processing engine and the XMC-3321 dual transceiver input/output mezzanine card. RapidIO provides a high bandwidth interconnect fabric between these cards, as well as the input/output functionality to ensure the efficient use of the processing resources. Software development tools include Spectrum's quicComm hardware abstraction layer, which facilitates algorithm partitioning and programming, and a real-time operating system. The SDR-4000 can be optimized for program specific size, weight, power consumption, cost and rugged requirements.