A Typical Sonar System that could be made with HERON products

We do not supply pre-configured Sonar (SOund Navigation and Ranging) systems - we do know enough about SONAR to help you with the signal processing subsystem though; several of our engineers have worked on Sonar in the past and we have many customers who have used our products for this.

SONAR is the use of sound to range and detect objects. Typically it is used underwater because of the excellent sound carrying properties of water - a kind of underwater RADAR. We've supplied a lot of hardware into subsea projects - even subsea communications, which use SONAR-type techniques to transmit data underwater.

While SONAR users traditionally wanted "some processing and some audio ADCs", we're now supplying complex systems including FPGA modules for beamforming and even multi-MHz ADC modules with quadrature sampling capability to be used with Digital Down Converters. 

It is often interesting to site the ADCs and some limited signal processing near to the transducers, and to pass the data via a cable (perhaps even tow cable) to the rest of the Signal Processing system. It can be interesting in those cases to use the Inter-Board connections to form a distributed system that can be booted and controlled from one place - it is nice to be able to change the program in a watertight vessel without having to lift it out of the water and open it!

Direct Digital Synthesis techniques can be useful for the transmitter. FFTs and High speed digital filters are also used extensively in Sonar.

A HERON system will typically use a multi-channel audio A/D. Sometimes the A/D needs to be a little more than the normal Audio, and needs to be a few 100 KHz to a MHz or so. If necessary multiple modules can be configured to use the same sample clock and provide more channels.

Traditionally Sonar systems have used beamforming techniques that use floating point DSPs.  However, more and more we are seeing FPGA modules being used for beamforming. Non traditional systems such as acoustic modems will of course have their own requirements

The modules will be placed onto a HERON module carrier - like the HEPC9 PCI, HECPCI9 cPCI or HERON-BASE2  cards.

Sonars often display received images. In that case you can use the imaging demo/Framework as an example of how to pass the images to the Host PC and display them there. 

You may also require additional interfaces to control other hardware.
You will also need software tools to develop the programs for your FPGAs and/or DSPs

So a typical system is :-
HEPC9 / HERON-BASE2, HERON2-C6203 / HERON-FPGA3, HERON-IO5. But your needs might be different - tell us what they are.