case studies
Enabling cost-effective manufacturing and improvement of an existing product via design update - FPGA based Amateur Radio transceiver
Brief: A manufacturer of RF transmission and measurement equipment wanted to improve one of their existing HF/VHF transceivers that is targeted at the amateur radio enthusiast market. They aimed to replace their analog, discrete based design with a digital solution, which offers substantial cost reduction in terms of development, test and assembly during manufacturing. The digital design approach was also intended to enable a better user interface with more functional controls to be integrated into the radio transceiver.
Solution: The core functions of frequency generation and user interface of the improved radio transceiver was realised via two digital Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). For frequency generation, a direct digital synthesiser was implemented in one of the FPGAs, in place of the current analogue variable frequency oscillator. This resulted in a very compact system, with high frequency stability and a small tuning resolution, coupled with the facilitation for memory functions. The second FPGA circuit handled both frequency control and frequency counter readout at the front panel. The robustness of the design is further improved by using a solid state version of the previous tube power amplifier.
The FPGA based approach also provided the option for more digital control functions such as memory mode recall, simplified frequency band switching and automatic mode switching.
Impact: The manufacturing cost of the new product was 30% cheaper due to lower component count, and hence faster assembly time. Test and development time of trial design was also reduced due to the reprogramming flexibility inherent in FPGAs.
With the acquired technical skill for incorporating FPGA design blocks, the manufacturer is now able to improve and supply more functionality to their other product lines.
The development cost of modernising the HF/VHF radio transceiver was 75K Euros. The envisaged payback period was 27 months, coupled with a return of investment of 300% over 3 years.