Using a digital signal processing module (DSP) from Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd., QinetiQ has developed a Portable Humanitarian Mine Detector (PHMD) that reduces the number of false alarms caused by ground clutter. The PHMD combines a pulse-induction metal detector with a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) array to discriminate between minimum-metal anti-personnel mines and small metal clutter. A capacitive sensor was added to provide information to help process the radar responses and to provide the operator feedback of the position of the sensors above the ground.
The GPR uses high-speed DSP and all-digital MLBS (maximum-length binary sequence) waveform generation with custom 9-GHz chips. An LVDS data link and a serial port for the metal detector capture the data. Processing, 3D focusing, and anomaly detection was performed by two Sundance SMT365 DSP modules featuring a Texas Instruments’ DSP tightly coupled to a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA.
The light-weight SMT365 features a 600-MHz TMS320C6416 fixed-point DSP with 4800 MIPS peak performance, 8 Mbytes of high-speed ZBTRAM (133 MHz) using K7A161801A-QC16, and 8 Mbytes of flash ROM for configuration/booting. It includes six ComPorts (up to 20 Mbytes/s each) for InterDSP communications and configuration, and two Sundance High-speed Bus (50-MHz, 100-MHz, or 200 MHz) ports 32 bits wide. The FPGA enables on-the-fly pre-processing of data before transfer to the DSP. To speed development and reduce overall design time, the SMT365 is supported by the TI Code Composer Studio and 3L Diamond RTOS.
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