High Efficiency Space-Based Software Radio Architectures: A Minimum Size, Weight, and Power TeraOps Processor

Los Alamos has recently completed the latest in a series of reconfigurable software radios, which incorporates several key innovations in both hardware design and algorithms. Due to our focus on satellite applications, each design must extract the best size, weight, and power performance possible from the ensemble of commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) parts available at the time of design. In this case we have achieved 1 TeraOps/second signal processing on a 1920 Megabit/second datastream, while using only 53 Watts mains power, 5.5 kg, and 3 liters. This processing capability enables very advanced algorithms such as our wideband RF compression scheme to operate remotely, allowing network bandwidth constrained applications to deliver previously unattainable performance.