Voices: Pentek’s Rodger Hosking: next-generation-radio architect

Tag : Thermal Fabric

News and New Products Voices: Pentek’s Rodger Hosking: next-generation-radioarchitect EDN talks with Rodger Hosking, vice president and co-founder ofPentek Inc, about high-performance data-acquisition,software-defined radio, upcoming technical opportunities, hiringengineering talent, and more. By Warren Webb, Technical Editor -- EDN, 9/4/2008
Rodger Hosking is vice president and co-founder of Pentek Inc,where he is responsible for new-product definition, technologydevelopment, and strategic alliances. With more than 30years’ experience in the electronics industry, he hasauthored hundreds of articles about software radio anddigital-signal processing. He designed the first commercialdirect-digital-frequency synthesizer and holds patents in frequencysynthesis and FFT (fast-Fourier-transform)-spectrum-analysistechniques. Hosking has a bachelor’s degree in physics fromAllegheny College (Meadville, PA) and both bachelor’s andmaster’s degrees in electrical engineering from ColumbiaUniversity (New York).
What are the technical challenges that you face inhigh-performance-data-acquisition- and software-radio-productdevelopment?
Complexity of the silicon devices, coupled with high componentdensity and power dissipation, pushes the limits of PCB[printed-circuit-board] design, mechanical packaging, andthermal-management technology. Gigabit serial links impose strictlayout rules for matching lengths and impedances ofdifferential-signal pairs. Testing and validation of new designsrequires not only hardware expertise, but also a significantsoftware effort because of the complexity and inaccessibility ofhardware test points. Drivers and software libraries offered by theCOTS [commercial-off-the-shelf] vendors to supportcustomer-development efforts need to support multipleoperating-system environments and require more testing,qualification, and documentation than ever before.
All of these factors lead to longer development cycles while therate of new-technology-device introductions is increasing. This[combination of factors] leads to shorter life cycles for eachproduct, even though development costs are higher.
As you look ahead for the next few years, which technologies andapplications present the most interesting opportunities?
FPGAs have created a major shift in COTS-product offerings for dataacquisition and software radio by offering critical functions,including fast and flexible I/O resources, DSP engines,configurable logic and RAM, gigabit serial interfaces, and built-inmicrocontrollers. All of these features will become more powerfulin next-generation FPGAs. Monolithic ADC and DAC technology willcontinue to advance both resolution and sampling rates while tamingpower dissipation with new silicon techniques.