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Tech Recon Multicore in Radar and SIGINT
Multicore Gaming Tech Boosts Next-Gen Radar Next-gen airborne radar imaging needs more processing capability while meeting stringent power constraints. Multicore technology addresses the scalability and parallelprogramming challenges of these next-generation systems.
Jeffery Rudin, Staff Systems Engineer Mercury Computer Systems
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Synergistic Processing Unit with SIMD engine Memory Flow Controllers
256 kB irborne Synthetic Aperture RaSPE SPE SPE SPE and DMA engines Local Store Memory on each SPE dar (SAR) has been used for reMFC LS MFC LS MFC LS MFC LS connaissance in environments PowerPC where electro-optic and infrared techHigh speed Processor L1 interface for PPE nologies cannot be used such as during I/O L2 Interface external I/O the night or when the scene is obscured High speed EIB ed external memory by weather conditions. SAR provides Coherent interface High speed XDR DRAM the warfighter with a f lyby snapshot Interface Interface interface to of an area that can be used for terrain other Cell processors mapping, targeting and assessment of High speed interconnect MFC LS MFC LS MFC LS MFC LS troop movement. In addition, because between PPE and SPEs SAR uses coherent processing, it can SPE SPE SPE SPE panies providing solutions now literally find “footprints in the sand” ration into products, technologies and companies. Whether your goal is to research the latest Figure 1 the other technologies lication Engineer,where or jump to a company's technical page, the cannot. goal of Get Connected is to put you Because power of today’s modice you require for whatever of typethe of technology, The IBM Cell Broadband Engine (BE) processor offers dramatically improved performance ies and productsern you are searching for. many operations such processors, for graphic-intensive workloads and computationally intensive applications. as these can bewww.cotsjournalonline.com/getconnected performed with a single processor core. However, the mission is changing. by Circular-SAR (CSAR). Instead of a Multicore processing chips answer Today’s counter-insurgency op- straight-line flyby, the airborne platform the power-energy challenge while inerations require more than reconnais- circles the area of observation, continu- creasing processing capability. For many sance—they require surveillance. The ously illuminating an area with radar. years, increasing the computational ability to observe an area on a 24/7 ba- Instead of snapshots, a SAR movie is power of processing chips has been sis enables the warfighter to monitor created, increasing the required process- achieved by increasing the core clock real-time activity and perform foren- ing by the frame rate. This new mission frequency. However, this increases the sic analysis. This capability is provided requires much more processing in order required input power and cooling by the to reformat and coherently integrate the cube of the frequency. A partial answer radar signals. Additionally, this must be is achieved by using superscalar, singleGet Connected with companies mentioned in this article. accomplished in the power- and energy- instruction multiple-data (SIMD) arwww.cotsjournalonline.com/getconnected constrained airborne environment. chitectures and larger memory caches.
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[ 30 ] COTS Journal February 2008 Get Connected with companies mentioned in this article. www.cotsjournalonline.com/getconnected