The SFF SDR Development Platform addresses the need for highly portable SDRs for military, public safety and commercial markets. The platform fulfills the requirements of low-power, compact, portable radios and nano/femto base stations.

Meeting the most rigorous requirements for size, performance, power and portability, ORBexpress is the industry’s first Software Communications Architecture (SCA)-certified object request broker (ORB), providing the foundation of all Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) radios. It is also the only Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) ORB that was architected from the ground up for both Xilinx’s Virtex™ series of FPGAs and TI’s TMS320DM6446 system-on-chip (SoC). The TI TMS320DM6446 SoC is comprised of the TMS320CC64x+™ DSP core and an ARM9 GPP. ORBexpress enables the ARM9, the DSP and the FPGA processing resources to be treated as coprocessors, streamlining development resulting in a faster time-to-market. The SFF SDR Development Platform is the industry’s first development platform to support CORBA on an FPGA, providing performance increases of up to 100x over software running on a GPP.

Texas Instruments commented on the significance of including ORBexpress in the new SDR platform:

"ORBexpress fulfills an important role in this new SDR platform. It provides a distributed communications platform for both the ARM and DSP segments of the TMS320DM6446 SoC, allowing SDR designers to maximize processor resources intelligently. ORBexpress allows the ARM and DSP to do what each does best: the DSP handles the most performance-intensive signal processing, leaving the GPP to handle the control logic," stated Ram Sathappan, Software Defined Radio Marketing Manager, TI.

"Objective Interface has put their communications middleware into hardware blocks on the Virtex series of FPGAs, allowing engineers to more easily use high-performance Xilinx FPGAs in their designs," said Manuel Uhm, Senior Marketing Manager for the DSP Division at Xilinx. "In the SFF SDR Development Platform, this middleware technology simplifies the programming of FPGAs, while also significantly increasing application code reuse, which is becoming critical in sophisticated systems such as SDRs running wideband waveforms."

Lyrtech’s Chief Technology Officer Louis Bélanger added "Our SFF SDR platform features a tight integration of ORBexpress running on the FPGA, DSP and GPP processors. It combines the very small and fast ORBexpress communications infrastructure with highly efficient inter-processor transports. The result is a pre-integrated development platform that is both flexible and offers a fully optimized foundation to bring products to market quickly."

Green Hills Software, Inc., provider of the INTEGRITY® real-time operating system (RTOS) and the MULTI® Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides the application foundation for the SFF SDR Development Platform, has long nurtured a collaborative relationship with Objective Interface. Dan Mender, Green Hills’ director of business development, commented: "Objective Interface’s ORBexpress enjoys a well-earned reputation for adoption and use in SDR designs worldwide. Their ORB has been highly optimized for INTEGRITY and fully supports and integrates our high-performance transport connections, delivering a high-speed, field-tested combination for even the most demanding SDR systems."

About ORBexpress from Objective Interface

ORBexpress is the industry’s most widely deployed ORB for SDR. SCA-based SDRs are systems that require CORBA for the design and deployment of their radio application. As a small-footprint product, ORBexpress optimizes the use of scarce resources, which is important for small, light-weight, low-power hand-held radios. As real-time communications middleware, ORBexpress provides the predictability of behavior and reliability required for SDR platforms.

ORBexpress is based on the Real-time CORBA standard that enables real-time and embedded devices in heterogeneous environments to communicate seamlessly. Thousands of customers worldwide have used the ORBexpress communications infrastructure to build more flexible, upgradeable and capable products.

ORBexpress provides support for general purpose processors (GPPs), DSPs and FPGAs. Available in C++, Ada and Java, ORBexpress has been recognized as the fastest ORB in the industry in an independent study conducted by Boeing’s Phantomworks Group. For more information on ORBexpress and the Objective Interface portfolio of communications middleware, please visit: www.ois.com/products, call 1 800-800-OIS7 in the U.S., +33 (0) 6 68 35 15 45 in Europe or +81 (0)3-5623-2112 in Japan or e-mail inquiries to: info@ois.com.

About Objective Interface Systems

Objective Interface is the worldwide leader of high-performance, real-time and embedded communications middleware solutions. The company provides CORBA ORBs, publish-subscribe technology based on the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service standard (DDS), and secure communications middleware development tools based on the Multiple Independent Levels of Security/Safety (MILS) architecture to meet the high-performance requirements of military and aerospace, telecommunications, data communications, industrial automation and process control, transportation and consumer electronics markets. Objective Interface products are the communications core of many mission-critical products and systems including mission-critical avionics systems, network management, vehicle control and management systems, software defined radio, telecommunication systems, process control systems and nuclear fusion ignition facilities. Objective Interface customers consist of the world’s most advanced product and engineering organizations including The Boeing Company, BAE Systems, CERN, Daimler-Benz, EADS, Ericsson, Eurocontrol Experimental Centre, General Dynamics, Harris Corporation, Hughes Network Systems, ITT, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Honeywell, Kongsberg Defense & Aerospace, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Lockheed Martin, Lyrtech, Nikon, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Philips, Raytheon, Rockwell Collins, Saab Technical Systems, Samsung, Sandia, Selex Communications, Telefunken, Thales Communications, TRW, the U.S. Department of Defense, ViaSat and many others. For more information, please visit: www.ois.com