ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / This paper describes the use of an efficient FPGA design flow, called Ogre, developed at BYU to design and implement PCM/FM demodulators. Ogre exploits the notion of reuse by taking advantage of a library of specially designed cores parameterized by XML metadata. A judicious choice of library cores, targeted to signal processing functions common to sampled data modulators and demodulators, reduces the design and test cycle time. We demonstrate this by using the tool to construct rapid prototypes of three different versions of FM demodulators and show that the bit error rate performance is comparable to demodulators on the market today.

ITC/USA 2006 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Second Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 23-26, 2006 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / A Synthetic Beamforming antenna was built for Airborne Telemetry. Low-Noise Block-converters translated RF to IF suitable for direct analog-to-digital conversion. Then all telemetry functions were performed digitally via parallel FPGAs for 10 independent sources. Monopulse tracking and optimal diversity combination was performed using 4 antenna quadrants at two orthogonal polarizations. Novel estimation approaches drove digital demodulation, symbol- and bit- synchronization. Final telemetry outputs include: digital, analog (video), and analog IF (e.g., for downlink relay). This program has incubated several concepts that we believe have the combined potential to significantly improve the future of telemetry.