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The aim of this study is to introduce a virtual laboratory platform with metadata-based API for the creation of dynamic software components. Also, the study seeks to assess the platform’s validity and technological acceptance among the community of system developers. The platform is referred to as Esfinge Virtual Lab, and it has been developed utilizing the Java programming language. The platform has a general purpose and is demonstrated in this work in the context of system prototyping. Using declarative programming techniques and a metadata-based APIs, a software developer may focus on business principles and processes rather than expend energy on the retrieval of information or the programming of the user interface. The Esfinge Virtual Lab platform enables developers to efficiently produce diverse forms of data visualization with minimal coding effort. This includes the rapid generation of tables, graphs, maps, and personalized outputs. The components are packaged as Java Archive (JAR) files and uploaded onto the platform. The components that have been loaded can be accessed for execution and can be either injected or dynamically invoked for a new component, thereby facilitating code reuse. This study provides a comprehensive explanation of the platform, including its internal architecture and features. The deployment of the Esfinge Virtual Lab was demonstrated through two practical applications in Brazilian institutions, namely INPE and CEMADEN. A survey was performed to determine the validity of the platform, consisting of open-ended and closed-ended questions. The research used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a quantitative analytical instrument and thematic analysis as a qualitative analytical approach.

This letter proposes a new methodology based on the recently proposed Julia language for efficient software-defined radio (SDR) prototyping. SDRs are immensely popular as they allow to have a flexible approach for sounding, monitoring, or processing radio signals through the use of generic analog components and lot of digital signal processing. As, in this paradigm, most of the processing is done at software levels (i.e., on a CPU), an efficient software methodology has to be envisioned. Right now, most of the existing methods focus on low-level languages (C or C++) for good runtime performance (at the cost of easy prototyping) or high-level languages (such as Python) for flexibility (at the price of runtime performance). In this article, we propose a new methodology based on Julia language that addresses this two-language problem and paves the way for efficient prototyping without giving up runtime performance. To prove the benefits of the proposed approach, a performance benchmark with several optimization levels compares the Julia approach with C++ and Python. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modernization of global positioning systems (GPS) boosts the development of civil and military applications as accuracy and coverage of receivers continually improve. Recently, software defined radio (SDR) approach for GPS receivers (GPS-SDR) gained attention because of its flexibility for multimode operations in different environments. The SDR receiver developers continually advance algorithmic and/or hardware accelerator solutions. However, they need fast prototyping and testing instrumentation to refine and evaluate high performance multimode receivers. This paper presents a feasibility study of fast prototyping of the GPS receiver accelerators using graphical user interface environments. It also describes a testbed with integrated RF front-ends, GPS simulator, receiver, and assistance support. Particularly, a novel host-target codesign solution is demonstrated using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) peripheral and LabVIEW FPGA tool for a case study of a GPS acquisition module. Distributing tasks between the FPGA target and the personal computer host achieves a high performance solution. The fast prototyped solution is compared with a conventional FPGA and state-of-the-art implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]