RF Engines wins another UK Government funding award for its Tuneable Pipelined Frequency Transform

November 27, 2002 - RF Engines Limited, the signal-processing specialist based on the Isle of Wight, UK, has received another major technology award from the UK Government’s Department of Trade and Industry. The Smart award is for further development of one of RF Engines’ most advanced Digital Signal Processing designs. This is the second such Government funded award that the company has received in the past year. Smart awards are designed to assist medium and small sized UK businesses grow and develop innovative technologies.

This latest award is to support the development of its Tuneable Pipelined Frequency Transform (TPFT) design into production, and for its realisation in FPGA and ASIC based designs. The TPFT is one of the latest designs from RFEL, and is a re-configurable multi-channel filter bank, which allows channels/carriers to be extracted and customised from the full input spectrum in real-time, and re-configured on-the-fly to other frequency plans.

The product is targeted at a range of applications where re-configurable front ends are required; from wideband multi-standard receivers such as satellite earth station receivers, base station receivers, re-configurable radio systems (Software Defined Radio) through to instrumentation. It is aimed at those applications requiring the channelisation of wideband signals (~150 MHz) into different size frequency bins arbitrarily distributed across the input spectrum.

The product therefore gives the users the freedom to tailor the design to their requirements, and allows them to specify channels by centre frequency and bandwidth, to fully define the filter characteristics, and to then reconfigure in real-time to a different frequency plan or plans, as required. Furthermore, spectral shaping masks can also be directly applied onto the outputs within the architecture itself, so allowing even the final filter shapes to be finely tuned to the needs of the application.

Commenting on the award, Tony Howells, who heads the Smart Team in the South East for the UK Government’s Smart Awards scheme, said: “RF Engines is a prime example of a relatively small but highly innovative UK company that has the creativity and entrepreneurship to identify and develop radical new products. This creativity from the grass roots of industry is a vital part of the UK economy, and awards such as this are the most practical way for the Government to help and speed exciting developments into successful commercial products. This is an excellent example of UK innovation leading the rest of the world.”

For further information, please see the website at www.rfel.com or contact RF Engines at Innovation Centre, St Cross Business Park, Newport, Isle of Wight, PO30 5WB, Great Britain. Tel +44 (0) 1983 550330. E-mail info@rfel.com.

For information on the Smart award scheme, please see the website at www.go-se.gov.uk/key%20business/innovation/innovation.htm