Architecture of ASCAMP digital hardware

The advanced single-channel antijam man-portable (ASCAMP) is a low-power, lightweight, portable EHF satellite communications terminal supporting the Satellite Data Link Standard (1582C). The author discusses the design philosophy and architecture of the ASCAMP downlink processor (DP), a subsystem which performs baseband processing and extraction of intelligence from the received signal. To ensure absolute minimum size and power consumption, the whole DP is a custom-designed hardware structure tailored to the specific needs. The architecture chosen consists of a number of hardware modules, each performing part of the needed data transformations. All share a common memory to which they have independent, time-multiplexed access. Besides performing assigned tasks, each also posts status and addressing information concerning its most recent data read-write operations. This self-documenting action provides control for rapid computational flow through the DP