Wideband High-Resolution Filterbank Firmware: Acceptance Testing and Excision Filtering

A filterbank is a signal processing tool that can facilitate manipulation of signals in the frequency domain. Under contract to DSTO, RF Engines Limited in the United Kingdom developed a 512-bin and a 4096-bin filterbank as firmware cores, capable of real-time digital processing at complex sample rates of 200MSPS (390kHz per bin) and 100MSPS (24kHz per bin) respectively. These cores will facilitate research and development into high-performance adaptive filtering in support of Defence wireless communications tasks. In this document, the integration of the cores into an existing platform and subsequent acceptance testing are reported, confirming that the cores do satisfy their design specification. Then the application of the cores to front-end excision filtering in a direct-sequence spread-spectrum receiver is investigated, and demonstrates a highly effective performance enhancement.