Communication Research Center (CRC) Canada - 2010 Industry Achievement Award
From the very beginning of SDR, CRC has been at the forefront of developing SDR standards, proselytizing the benefits of SDR throughout the world, educating opinion-makers and developers throughout the world about SDR, and developing technologies that can be used by programs throughout the world. CRC has been making significant contributions to the SCA specification since the very beginning. They made the very first international change proposal to the JTRS program, which was significant in the early days since it demonstrated the SCA was interesting to more than just the US DoD. CRC has also been credited for proposing the use of ports/connections and the OMG's CCM XML file format. CRC has submitted over 25 change proposals to the JTRS program, many of which have been included in the different releases.
In 2000, CRC created one of the very first Core Framework implementations, that of SCAv0.3 which had not even been released publicly yet. This work was used by CRC to submit many crucial change proposals (e.g. ports/connections and XML file format). In 2002, CRC was the first organization to be funded by the SDRF for technical work when it created the SCA Reference Implementation and released it open-source (SCARI-Open). In 2004, SCARI-Open went through JTAP testing and obtained an incredible success rate for testing; everything was accomplished in only six days which had not previously been done. The SCARI-Open has been downloaded several thousand times from worldwide organizations (educational, research centres, SDR consultants, and radio manufacturers). SCARI-Open has contributed to the emancipation of the SCA inside and outside the US DOD market. In 2002, CRC made the first demonstration of an SCA commercial waveform at the SDR02. The waveform was a Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) receiver running in real-time on a 1Ghz laptop.
Year after year, CRC has travelled the globe to make technical presentations about the SCA. CRC is a regular invited speaker at the IQPC's SDR Europe Conference, SMi's International Software Radio Conference, IDGA's Radio summit and the SDR Forum Technical Conference.
CRC has trained over 600 engineers in 16 countries on how to use the SCA to build radios and has been the largest promoter of the SCA and the SDR Forum throughout the years. They joined the Forum in 1999, and Claude Belisle served as a member of the SDRF/WInnF Board of Directors for several years. CRC has also been involved at the technical level within the SDR Forum. Claude Belisle chaired the Technical Committee and various work groups and Steve Bernier has chaired and co-chaired SCA related work groups as well as being a major contributor to different technical work groups.
CRC has attended the vast majority of the working sessions and has the largest team dedicated to SDR/SCA and that allows CRC to make significant contributions year round. In short, CRC has been one of the industry's most prominent supporters of SDR/SCA for the last 10 years.