Switch Matrix Technology Finds Hypres A Middleman Twixt Analog + Digital

Hypres is currently developing a family of reprogrammable all-digital receivers, transmitters, and transceivers. In addition to Software Defined Radio applications, their Digital-RF™ product line will include versions for cognitive radio, mobile broadband, satellite and tactical communications, signals intelligence, electronic warfare, and RADAR.

The Company recently demo’d RF distribution and routing functionality completely within the digital domain of the radio architecture on a recent U.S. Army Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) project. Accomplished through the company’s newly patented Digital-RF switch matrix technology, this new RF distribution and routing capability is essential to realize the full potential of high performance, reconfigurable multi-band and multi-channel radio systems such as the Software Defined Radio. RF distribution and routing refers to the transport mechanism that moves the incoming RF signal from the antenna, through the analog front end components, to the appropriate digital baseband signal processing resources. Due to the performance limitations inherit in semiconductor-based radio architectures, conventional RF distribution and routing has always been in the analog domain.  The Hypres Digital-RF switch matrix allows RF distribution and routing in the digital domain directly between any of the radio’s analog front end components and digital processing resources. Co-inventor Alex Kirichenko, a renowned expert in superconductor digital circuits and a lead circuit designer at Hypres, was the principal designer of the switch matrix circuit, which has been successfully integrated with multiple analog-to-digital converters and digital processing circuitry on a single chip receiver.