OTTAWA – The Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) and DSO National Laboratories of Singapore have produced what they are calling the world’s smallest Software Defined Radio (SDR) with the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) specification. It is for use in commercial and consumer applications.
SCA radio are usually rack mount or truck mount radios that are large and heavy, but now the same architecture has been used to produce smaller radios. The SDR radio uses commercial boards sold by Gumstix and runs on a FM line-of-sight application. The radio’s three blades stack together and measure about 1 cm high by 3 cm wide by 10 cm long.
The radio was shown at the 2007 SDR Technical Conference and Product Exhibition in Denver.
“We have once again pushed the limits of innovation,” says CRC president Veena Rawat. “By partnering with DSO Laboratories we have demonstrated the feasibility of using the SCA specification to develop tiny radios. We have long proven SCA’s applicability to military radios, but with this project we are making the technology applicable to many more products within the vehicular, robotics, and consumer industries.”
The Gumstix Audio Pack includes an Intel XScale processor, an audio card for A/D and D/A functions, and an Ethernet port. An external RF unit developed by CRC’s engineers provides wireless access in the 150 and 460 MHz bands.
All the SCA devices to control the processor, the audio card, and RF unit have also been developed to make the Gumstix Audio Pack a real SCA-ready transceiver. Using the SCA ArchitectTM modeling tool, the team easily converted an FM waveform to the SCA specification to provide communications with commercial radios.
