Realtime Data Recording

Pentek High Speed Real-Time Recording Systems

Overview

The Pentek Real-Time Recording Systems eliminate the time and risk associated with developing in house recording solutions. They are proven to reduce the time-to-market in commercial and defence applications, by allowing the customer’s engineers to focus on other parts of the project. With increasing pressure in both the defense and commercial arenas to get to the market first, today’s system engineers are looking for more complete off-the-shelf subsystem offerings. Out of the box, all systems arrive as complete instruments with a full-featured virtual operator control panel ready for immediate data recording and/or playback operation. Because they consist of modular COTS board-level products and flexible control software, they are easily scalable to larger multichannel data acquisition and recording applications requiring sustained rates up to 160 MB/sec. For example, they can be used as the data acquisition resource for embedded systems for real-time digital signal processing applications. A complete suite of software development tools simplifies custom system integration.

Ready-to-Run Recording Systems:

The systems are complete, fully integrated systems featuring a range of A/D and D/A resources with high-speed Fibre Channel links to cost-effective RAID and JBOD disk arrays. Depending on the configuration, each system occupies one or two slots in a VME chassis.

All systems are fully programmable and offer the flexibility of FPGA technology for addressing high-bandwidth data recording and playback applications such as radar, direction finding, SIGINT, telemetry and commercial wireless.

Each Real-Time Recording System is a tested, configured system consisting of a host computer (customer-supplied), card cage, processing boards, I/O modules, cabling, media storage devices and documentation. The modular architecture not only ensures flexibility to cover different numbers of channels, it also facilitates performance upgrades as new modules with the latest technology devices become available.

SystemFlow Recording Software:

All recording systems are supported with Pentek’s SystemFlow Recording Software suite. SystemFlow provides a rich set of features for controlling the data acquisition and recording functionality of these systems and ensures a consistent look and feel for developers across all RTS systems.

SystemFlow’s GUI (graphical user interface) allows the operator to control all programmable hardware function parameters including gating, triggering, data formatting and clock selection on the various A/D, D/A, digital downconverter, and digital upconverter modules.

A file management system supports recording and playback of data files on the RAID or JBOD with terabytes of storage and archiving of files to the host PC running Windows or Linux. Configuration profiles for specific hardware settings can be stored and retrieved to streamline setting up recurring measurement scenarios (ideal for Production Testing).

The SystemFlow Signal Viewer presents a calibrated time and frequency display of data files after signal acquisition and serves as a monitor of live input signals for a prerecording check.

The SystemFlow API allows developers to configure and customize the subsystem interfaces and operation. It includes code not only for the real-time data acquisition, recording and playback functions, but also for the user-control software running on the host PC. Source code is supplied for all API functions and for the GUI control panel, which allows the user to create a custom front-end if needed.

Further SystemFlow Recording Software Details

FPGAs Offer Flexibility:

Pentek recording platforms include user-programmable FPGAs to implement real-time signal processing, formatting and data manipulation functions to data flowing through the input and output channels. When used in conjunction with the Xilinx ISE Foundation Tools, Pentek’s GateFlow FPGA Design Kit allows customers to add their own algorithms and IP to the standard factory FPGA functional blocks. The kit includes VHDL source code, ISE project files, design information files, and development utilities.

In addition, Pentek offers GateFlow IP cores that include wideband and narrowband digital downconverters, FFTs, and radar pulse compression engines.

Digital Recording Systems from Pentek:

Analog Recording Systems from Pentek: