This makes me more worried, not less.
The reason why you couldn't repurpose those things targeted at "specific technologies" is that they were engineered for purpose.
You don't want a general "radio decoder". You want a 4G modem. You don't wan't a wideband ADC--you want low power for battery usage so you want to narrow the bandwidth as much as possible. You are willing to give up generality in order to get a couple more dB in order to increase your range by another couple miles, etc.
The problem is that it is so expensive to do your own chip that everybody tries to shoehorn their solution into something that exists in volume but really isn't quite right simply to avoid that expense.
If you want to fix electronics, find a way to make VLSI fabrication cost $500 and have a 5 day turnaround.
That's consumer products. DoD wants generality even if it costs more.
The electronics industry ignores what DoD wants because DoD won't buy a million parts a month. That's been going on for a long time. It really upset some USAF generals in the 1980s; they were used to driving the industry, not following it. It's gotten worse since, because the center of the electronics industry has moved to Asia.
This project is a niche thing for military short-run production. That's fine. There may be commercial spinoffs. But it's aimed at DoD's needs.
The military also wants the ability to change waveforms and protocols on the fly to avoid detection, another thing civilian radios never need.
They're trying to replace all their current radios with the Joint Tactical Radio System, which is the usual defense procurement boondoggle. Billions spent, not much produced: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/how-t... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/the-a...
>The final contract for Rifleman Radios, awarded to Thales and Harris, was for up to $3.9 billion to deliver 193,276 more radios. That amounts to around $20,000 per radio, including accessories and support; in 2014, the military expected the Rifleman Radio to cost about $5,600 per unit. The Manpack radios were expected in 2014 to cost about $72,000; the actual line item for Manpacks under the 2017 budget was $114.9 million for 1,459 radios; that's nearly $78,000 and does not include the maintenance, accessories, and services. That's not exactly the kind of cost savings one would expect from a commodity, standards-based system.
Ah, I missed that this was the DoD whingeing about the fact that they can't get people to design complicated systems for them for free.
However, even the DoD doesn't want only generality. The DoD generally has hard constraints on power and size and that fights against (and generally beats) generality.
Agreed. The root problem is that producing chips has become so expensive and proprietary that it has become extremely centralized. I would bet that no more than a few hundred people decide the big design questions of the chips in nearly all computers produced today.
Or, more directly, someone who already has the design win can probably undercut your price and still make a profit (don't have to redesign anything so all the NRE is already sunk). So, if you want the design win, you have to take an initial loss and then hope you can squeeze the cost of the chip to gain some profit. Not a good bet.
The pot of money for semiconductors is effectively fixed for right now so companies are going to just keep eating one another until that changes or governments step in.
Might we not want both, for different purposes? Software-defined radio won't match the performance or efficiency of specialized RF hardware, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have any utility.
https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/analog-devices-inc...
The AD9361 is exactly that all purpose programmable radio.
http://www.analog.com/en/products/rf-microwave/integrated-tr...
https://zeptobars.com/en/read/AD9361-SDR-Analog-Devices-DAC-...
Not going to make many portable radios out of that, methinks.