A major aerospace company wanted to enhance and future-proof its RF-enabled products with a software-defined waveform platform that would enable critical software updates “on the fly.” The company considered REDHAWK, a software defined waveform platform that supports the development, deployment, and management of real-time software radio applications. But first, they wanted to know how it would perform.
DornerWorks engineers integrated the REDHAWK platform on our own Virtuosity OA hypervisor distribution, running on the Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC ZCU111 Evaluation Kit.
REDHAWK is deployed in several government applications already, and aligns with SOSA Consortium initiatives, enabling state-of-the-art sensor systems in aerospace environments. One of the goals of SOSA is to run REDHAWK on VPX processing cards.
The Virtuosity OA distribution provides a path to The Open Group FACE Technical Standard conformance because it is certified to the FACE TS, aligned with SOSA, and enables software separation and interoperability through containers and virtual machines.
The configuration DornerWorks provided allows multiple waveforms to be generated or processed in separate virtual machines, all on a single card and all communicating with each other over a CORBA protocol.
DornerWorks provided a performance characterization of both the REDHAWK application and the hypervisor itself on the customer’s target hardware. Engineers found that the REDHAWK application ran successfully with a minimum of 11% CPU utilization, with steep drop-offs in performance gains at around 25%. With a better understanding of the resource utilization of those components, the customer could approach their RF-enabled product development with heightened efficiency and greater confidence.