A Complete Integrated DevelopmentEnvironment for SDR

THE CRC TEAM

The Communications Research Centre Canada (CRC) is Canada's national centre of expertise in telecommunications, conducting research and development (R&D) in satellite communications, terrestrial wireless, broadcasting, broadband network and radio propagation.

One of CRC's key activities is the development of Software Defined Radio (SDR) technologies. At the heart of SDR R&D is the CRC SCARI Software SuiteTM. Based on the Software Communications Architecture (SCA), as specified by the US Department of Defence (DoD) Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), the SCARI Software Suite is a complete, integrated software development environment designed to facilitate the development of SDR-based radios.

The Suite has been engineered by the largest team of core framework experts in the industry. The CRC team has influenced every release of the SCA specification since 1999, introducing many of the essential features of today's specification. CRC partnered with the SDR Forum and US DoD JTRS Program Office to produce the first open-source, and most popular, SCA core framework. CRC's team was also first to demonstrate a commercial SCA application, and to introduce an integrated development environment (IDE) for the SCA, to assist developers in every step of their work from modeling to deployment. Pioneers of automatic code generation, real-time validation and re-factoring, CRC has teamed up with the world's best-of-breed software and platform providers to offer a complete SDR development environment.

With more R&D person-years than any other vendor, coupled with expert technical support in all aspects of radio development, you can rely on CRC's SCA team for your SDR development.

CRC lets you leverage: • Expertise in every aspect of radio development, from satellite to terrestrial wireless to broadcast and networks; • The largest integrated team for SCA and associated SDR development tools; • The largest support of COTS development platforms, Object Request Brokers (ORBs), Operating Systems and processors to help protect your investment for the future; and • A wide range of professional services including training, technical support and consulting.

THE SCARI SOFTWARE SUITE

The SCARI Software Suite 2008 is the most comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for SDR on the market. Used internationally by platform and radio manufacturers as well as application providers, the Suite facilitates a reduced development risk and time-to-market, to obtain top-quality SDR products.

SCARI Software Suite is just one of the very successful projects in the 60 years of research at CRC. Since our pioneering role in satellite communications in the early 60s, CRC has been a leader in R&D in every aspect of communications.

Originally built for SDR, the SCARI Software Suite 2008 is now the environment of choice for many other industries within the embedded systems domain and can be applied easily to these industries: space, avionics, automobile and consumer electronics.

The SCARI Software Suite 2008 includes:

• SCA Architect: The platform independent, Eclipse-based
  development environment that lets you create, validate, and debug your components and applications in a single project.
• Component Development Libraries: Provides a set of generic functions that greatly simplifies code generation and significantly reduces memory requirements.
• Radio Manager: A platform run-time monitoring tool to install and control applications, as well as visualizing deployment strategies.
• SCARI++ Core Framework (CF): The CF of choice for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform providers, supporting the largest combination of operating systems and object request brokers and processors.

SCA ARCHITECT ^TM

The SCA Architect^TM is the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of the SCARI Software Suite. It covers the complete SDR development life cycle, from the creation and validation of components to their assembly into applications or nodes.

SCA Architect^TM is provided as a plug-in for the universally adopted, platform independent, Eclipse framework. Embedded system developers will benefit from a well-known interface, making it easy to migrate between the different development phases of their project.

SCA ARCHITECT Platform Independent Development Environment Reusable Modeling Elements Graphical Modeling Real-Time Validation Reverse Engineering and Refactoring Zero-Merge Code Generation Configuration Management

Reusable modeling elements
No need to repeat every step when creating components. SCA Architect^TM lets you create reusable component properties and ports, allowing you to assemble them into component types to create similar components much more quickly. This
feature, unique to SCA Architect, is also extremely useful when applying design modifications to many components. A modification at one place is automatically reflected in every component of similar type - a precious time-saving feature.

Real-time model validation
The real-time model validation feature of SCA Architect eliminates time-consuming retrofits to correct early errors, greatly accelerating the creation of SCA components. CRC's in-depth experience and expertise with the SCA has provided Architect with the largest set of validation rules in the industry.

Reverse engineering and re-factoring
SCA Architect^TM can also be used to model and validate pre-existing SCA domain profiles. Its powerful reverse engineering capabilities will provide a validation assessment of imported profiles. Architect's unique re-factoring feature can also automatically correct errors from a number of suggested fixes.

Unambiguous modeling
SCA Architect's superior modeling capabilities provide unambiguous graphical representations of assemblies, capturing the containment relationship between deployed components and their target - a key concept to enable the graphical
representation of all types of indirect connections and host co-location relationships. Architect's modeling capabilities make it the only tool capable of providing a determinist graphical representation of assemblies.

Zero-merge code generation
SCA Architect's generates fully functional POSIX C++ SCA components, to be built and used in applications without writing a single line of code. Being template based, SCA Architect can be tailored to support other programming or code conventions.

Architect breaks new ground by introducing "zero-merge" code generation capability. Developers specialize the behaviour of a component, instead of modifying it. Developers can at last remodel existing components, and regenerate code without having to merge two versions of the source code.

Configuration management
SCA Architect^TM pioneers model-level configuration management. Developers no longer have to manually track each individual artifact of a model element. It allows developers to save model elements directly to a repository. Developers don't have to save incoherent versions of those models. This feature radically simplifies configuration management.

Shared projects
SCA ArchitectT^M provides a way to reuse common modelling elements without having to duplicate them. SCA Architect^TM supports the Eclipse concept of shared projects. Rather than duplicating a modeling element, developers can reference projects containing shared elements. After all, "Reuse" is the SCA's philosophy.

COMPONENT DEVELOPMENT LIBRARIES

The Component Development Libraries (CDL) accelerate the creation of SCA-compliant components. The CDL lowers the learning curve of the SCA and speeds up the development by providing generic SCA components, designed to shield developers from the intricacies of the SCA and CORBA.

Using the CDL generic components drastically reduces the number of lines of code required to create components, simplifying the generated code and associated testing, thereby reducing the development cycles. Also available as shared
libraries, the CDL enables the creation of very small footprint SCA components.

The CDL is Core Framework independent and is available for most popular operating environments.

Generic log and event ports
The CDL provides generic implementations of a Log port and an Event channel port. These are used to report logging messages or to produce events that may be consumed by other components. It implements these through generic ports that transparently handle all the requirements of the SCA. Developers only need to worry about producing messages, not levels and connections. In fact, the CDL offers much more than the SCA required behaviour, allowing components to save the logging messages produced before a Log service becomes available. This unique feature provides precious debugging information that is otherwise lost.

Generic components
The CDL provides a generic implementation of the two types of components SCA developers must create: the Resource and the Device. CDL components will automatically generate the SCA required log messages and events preventing developers from making costly compliance mistakes. They also implement the SCA and CORBA life-cycle, avoiding other potential compliance issues.

The implementation of the state behaviour for an SCA device is notoriously difficult, being one of the major sources of compliance issues. The CDL generic device takes that burden off the developer's shoulders by handling capacity allocation requests. This further contributes to the reduction in quantity of source code required for implementing a new SCA device. The CDL Device automatically handles the three state machines required for all SCA Devices, which, when combined, lead to 25 states and close to 70 transitions.

Generic PropertySet
The CDL generic components provide a framework for implementing properties which shields developers from the SCA and CORBA. Using the CDL Generic PropertySet, configuration requests are transformed into simple invocations to C++ member functions. Component property values are kept as simple C/C++ native data types. The CDL Generic PropertySet implements all of the SCA required behavior for configuration requests, increasing SCA compliance.

Debugging support
The CDL is provided in two binary forms: Release and Tracer. The Release version is compact and ready for embedded deployment. The Tracer version is instrumented with debugging code that produces tracing messages of varying levels that can be selectively turned on or off.

RADIO MANAGER

The Radio Manager is the essential tool for platform integrators and application testers. Through a block diagram representation, the integrator and tester can quickly visualize the SCA platform composition and see where each application resource has been deployed. The Radio Manager can visually represent how the connections between the resources and devices have been established.

In real-time, the Radio Manager introspects the SCA platform and reports the status of the devices and resources, refreshing the block diagram if needed. A new waveform being added, a device failing, a connection broken - all will be shown giving invaluable information to the integrators and testers to reduce debugging time.

The Radio Manager is to the SCA what a debugger is to source code. In fact, the Radio Manager can be connected to any embedded SCA platform, just like source code debuggers.

In addition, the Radio Manager can be used to serve many other purposes.

Installing and controlling applications

Built into the Radio Manager is an application installer used to upload the required application artifacts onto the platform. Once done, the Radio Manager can instantiate the application, start, configure and stop it, and finally terminate and remove the application.

The Radio Manager provides a generic properties browser which can render every type of SCA property and can change values dynamically or in batch mode.

Debugging features

The Radio Manager is a very useful tool to test performance of the platform and applications. It offers full control over the deployed components. It can therefore be used to modify the values of the application parameters when testing the application under different conditions; it can shut down a complete node while applications are running to analyse how the platform reacts in specific scenarios.

Extended introspection features

The Radio Manager provides two different views for displaying the deployed software components. The hierarchical view uses a tree-like structure, where each node represents a deployed component. The block diagram view uses a block for each deployed component.

When connected to the SCARI++ core framework, the Radio Manager can even show which components have been deployed onto other components and graphically displays how components have been inter-connected.

Specialized HCIs

The Radio Manager allows the system integrator to launch its own specialized Human Control Interface (HCI) to control the application. This becomes particularly interesting when specific APIs are required to control the radio.

Using SCA Architect, an SCA application can be packaged with a specialized HCI that will be installed with the application on the target SCA platform. After instantiation of the application, the Radio Manager searches for the existence of the specialized HCI, downloads it, and launches it.

SCARI++ CORE FRAMEWORK

Customers around the world are benefiting from CRC's expertise in SCA. Used for research projects, for development purposes or for actual fielded radios, SCARI++ is an SCA core framework you can always rely on.

Built from the ground up for embedded platforms, the SCARI++ Core Framework is a new generation core framework. Every design decision was made with real-time performance in mind.

With the lessons learned from the JTRS-certified SCARI-Open core framework, SCARI++ is available for an exceptional number of operating environments and has been used in several System-on-Chips solutions.

It is the most widely-adopted core framework, and is available pre-integrated with a number of generic SCA platform providers. SCARI++ is the cornerstone of CRC's SCA development solution.

Operating environments
Designed with portability in mind, the SCARI++ Core Framework is available for the widest number of operating environments. It is currently available for INTEGRITY, VxWorks, Linux, YellowDog, LynxOS and coming soon DSP-BIOS. SCARI++ also supports the best real-time ORBs: ORBexpress and TAO.

CRC's development team works closely with its partners to offer the most integrated products.

Processors
The SCARI++ Core Framework is also available for a wide variety of general purpose processors from the X86 series to the PowerPC, ARM and recently added XScale.

High-speed core framework
The SCARI++ Core Framework provides a full implementation of all the SCA framework interfaces. It implements exceptional real-time features to minimize the boot time of an SCA system. It transparently transforms indirect connections into faster direct connections. It uses a unique caching system to avoid long delays required for finding deployed components.

The SCARI++ DeviceManager even allows SCA Devices to be collocated into a single address space, which is significant for accelerating the boot sequence of a node. In fact, SCARI++ components can all be linked into a single address space to further accelerate the boot sequence.

Extended introspection features
SCARI++ supports unique introspection features used by CRC's RadioManager monitoring tool. Using SCARI++, developers can obtain detailed deployment information which allows them to determine where components have been deployed and how they have been interconnected.

Debugging support
SCARI++ is provided in two binary forms: Release and Tracer. The Release version is compact and ready for embedded deployment. The Tracer version is instrumented with debugging code that produces several levels of tracing messages that can be selectively turned on or off. SCARI++ can also save the logging messages produced to a file before a Log service becomes available.

Speed up your SDR development and reduce risk. Adopt the SCARI Software Suite and leverage the largest integrated team for SCA and associated SDR development tools as well as a wide range of professional services including training, technical support and consulting.

SUPPORT AND CONSULTING SERVICES

CRC offers a wide range of support and consulting services. We will gladly provide access to our expertise and knowledge of the different operating environments. We can take matters into our own hands and hunt down whatever problem you're having, be it OS, ORB, or board-specific.

CRC can provide you and your developers with certification and design expertise, to make systems SCA capable. We also offer in-depth knowledge to help optimize SCA platforms, by maximizing portability and data throughput and minimizing boot and application deployment time.

PARTNERSHIPS

When it comes to partnerships, CRC has a "Best in Breed" philosophy. By dealing with all the key industry players, we ensure our products are as open and compliant as possible. CRC avoids locked-in solutions; they simply aren't what we're looking for.

CRC has partnered with, and works closely with, the industry players. Our strength and knowledge allow us to offer development of platform specific expertise, available through consulting arrangements.

For more technical or licensing information please contact:

 

Mr. Jeet Hothi, Director, Technology Transfer Office

Communications Research Centre Canada

3701 Carling Ave., P.O. Box 11490, Station H

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K2H 8S2

Tel: 1 613 990-2089

Fax: 1 613 990-7671

Email: jeet.hothi@crc.gc.ca

www.crc.gc.ca/sdr