Military, Aerospace & Government

Radar technology is essential for defense, surveillance, and navigation, but increasing data demands, adaptability requirements, and environmental challenges push system designs to the limit.

FPGAs provide unmatched performance by integrating high-speed data converters, advanced signal processing blocks, and scalable resources into compact, efficient packages. One customer shared that using Altera’s Agilex™ 9 Direct RF FPGAs and SoCs helped to ‘shrink a refrigerator-sized piece of equipment down to a Rubik Cube’. These capabilities enable radar systems to handle growing bandwidth requirements, perform digital beamforming, and track multiple targets in real time—all while maintaining reliability in demanding environments.

Engineered for long-term durability, FPGAs adapt seamlessly to evolving mission needs, ensuring radar systems remain robust, efficient, and ready for the future.

Electronic Warfare (EW) is central to modern defense, requiring rapid adaptability and precision to address the increasing complexity of electronic threats. High bandwidth demands, frequency agility, and ultra-low latency are among the key challenges designers face in developing effective EW systems.

FPGAs offer unmatched flexibility and performance, enabling EW systems to manage high bandwidths, adapt across frequency ranges, and respond to threats in real time. By integrating advanced signal processing and reconfigurable resources into compact, efficient designs, FPGAs deliver the adaptability and speed essential for real-time responsiveness.

Secure communications demand adaptability, reliability, and efficiency under strict SWaP (size, weight, and power) constraints. To address these demands, FPGAs enable software-defined waveforms, advanced signal processing, and low-latency multi-channel data handling.

Strict logic separation ensures encrypted and unencrypted data protection, while hardened cryptographic services, including cryptographic blocks and key management subsystems, provide secure encryption, authentication, and compliance with military standards.

With multiple processors, FPGAs enable independent task operation and reduce SWaP burdens through compact, efficient designs. They incorporate anti-tamper features and resilience in harsh conditions, delivering reliable performance, making them indispensable for UAVs, naval systems, and other mission-critical applications.

In aerospace and avionics, where safety and precision are critical, FPGAs provide unparalleled reliability, efficiency, and adaptability. They enable compliance with rigorous safety standards like DO-254 by supporting redundant, independent processing paths for safety-critical functions, such as real-time sensor data processing in avionics systems.

In a data-driven world, government agencies face the dual challenge of managing massive datasets while achieving cost efficiency and performance gains.

FPGAs provide a versatile solution, boosting performance through parallel processing and optimizing data restructuring for faster searches and retrievals. For example, leveraging FPGAs for disk compression and erasure encoding can reduce RAID redundancy, cutting hard drives from 10 to 6, significantly lowering costs. Tools like Apache Arrow and Pulsar further utilize FPGAs to streamline unstructured data processing, enabling quick access to critical information.

By delivering speed, scalability, and minimized hardware footprints, FPGAs help agencies meet current demands and adapt to evolving technological needs.

In the evolving landscape of High-Performance Computing (HPC), FPGAs are redefining complex simulations and large-scale data processing with superior power efficiency and customizability.

FPGAs excel in power-sensitive applications, delivering high performance at lower energy costs in tasks like radio telescopes and large-scale simulations. Their tailored designs optimize repetitive workloads, such as floating-point computations and real-time weather analysis, driving faster decisions and improved accuracy.

By enhancing memory bandwidth and parallel processing, FPGAs outperform conventional solutions, enabling organizations to achieve peak performance and energy efficiency as HPC demands grow.