Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] EETimes: Va. Tech finds soft radio's missing link

[Eric Blossom]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 10:16:06AM -0700, Paul Hartke wrote:
> Va. Tech finds soft radio's missing link
> Patrick Mannion 
> Aug 16, 2004 (9:00 AM)
> URL: http://www.commsdesign.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=29100148 

This whole thing about SCA cracks me up.

Here they say it's the answer:

> Called the Software Communication Architecture, or SCA, the framework 
> derives from the U.S. government's need to have a common SDR definition 
> that would allow any company to write any waveform onto any radio. "This 
> would free it from expensive and complex proprietary SDR implementations 
> and open the door to outsourcing and competitive bids," said Alan Gatherer, 
> CTO of wireless infrastructure at Texas Instruments Inc. 


Then they admit that that CORBA is a loser for this application.  No kidding.

> While the goal is to bring SCA to the commercial market quickly, the 
> current iteration is too processing-intensive for that, said TI's Gatherer. 
> However, Reed said that plans are afoot to get rid of the common object-
> request broker architecture altogether, since Corba is the main source of 
> the processing overhead. "Corba also limits your ability to do I/O, as it's 
> very microprocessor-centric," Reed said. He said Ossie version 3.0, which 
> is due soon, will have those modifications. 


Reading between the lines, this looks like they're going to throw out
the SCA spec (the whole thing is based on CORBA/IDL), do something
else, then call the new thing SCA.

Note that anyone with half a clue who read the spec when it came out a
couple of years ago could have told them that it wasn't going to fly.
I wonder how many billions of tax dollars have been poured down this
rat hole so far?

I understand that they're trying to solve a problem, but OMG/CORBA/IDL
isn't the answer.

Eric