HTWAVE Unveils the Integrive-100, a Standalone Hardware-Accelerated MIMO Software-Defined Radio
Dual Arm Cortex-A9 cores and FPGA fabric allow this 70MHz to 6GHz SDR handle processing on-board in real-time.
Korean startup HTWAVE is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a standalone software-defined radio with hardware-accelerated multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) capabilities and a 70MHz to 6GHz frequency range: the Integrive-100.
"Integrive-100 is a standalone, real-time MIMO SDR [Software-Defined Radio] platform designed to streamline advanced wireless research and rapid prototyping through a hardware-accelerated architecture," says HTWAVE's Jayoung Oh. "With ultra-low phase noise design and a proven real-time PHY baseline, Integrive-100 delivers research-grade signal integrity in a compact, self-contained system, eliminating the need for bulky workstations or external clocking setups. It enables engineers and researchers to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure."
The radio board is based around the Analog Devices AD9361, which the company calls an "RF Agile Transceiver" and was originally developed for use in cellular base stations. It offers tuning from 70MHz to 6GHz in the receive band and as low as 47MHz in the transmission band, up to 56MHz bandwidth per channel, with a 2×2 MIMO setup and integrated 12-bit digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters (DACs and ADCs) running at up to 61.44 megasamples per second (MSps).
Elsewhere on the board is an AMD Zynq 7020 system-on-chip, which combines two 886MHz Arm Cortex-A9 application-class processor cores with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) offering 85k logic cells and 220 digital signal processing (DSP) slices. It's this which makes the HTWAVE standalone: all processing can occur on-device using the spare FPGA logic and the Arm cores, without the need to connect to an external host. When you need to get the data off, the board offers a choice of USB and gigabit Ethernet interfaces.
"By executing core PHY functions directly on the onboard FPGA within a standalone Zynq-based system, it delivers deterministic, low-latency, real-time performance without host-PC bottlenecks," claims Oh of the benefits to the standalone design. "A validated hardware baseline and streamlined API [Application Programming Interface] access allow engineers to move quickly from power-on to experimentation, focusing on novel algorithms, MIMO techniques, and advanced wireless concepts rather than rebuilding signal chains from scratch."
More information is available on the HTWAVE website, while those interested in picking a board up can sign up on Crowd Supply to be notified when the company's crowdfunding campaign goes live.