There are many circumstances when a signal intelligence expert is faced with the need to quickly extract data from an otherwise unknown signal, but lacks the knowledge of how the signal was modulated. The traditional approach to this would be to go through an analysis phase to construct a hypothesis of the signal’s modulation parameters, an then enter a design phase to create the required custom radio receiver. This process is a slow progression of steps from signal analysis, receiver modeling, receiver design, to prototyping. This process mimics the traditional approach towards radio receiver design where a fairly efficient radio is ultimately realized. Efficiency is usually measured in terms of hardware resources used, such as gates and multipliers, or power consumption. With the progression of technology, many of these metrics are outdated or even meaningless when instant gratification is needed. For example, minimizing the number of multipliers may be moot if the target
platform contains multiple FPGAs with thousands of otherwise unused multipliers is available. If the speed of deployment is paramount, and the prototyping platform has an abundance of resources, then the design process can be altered in a way to produce an operational yet possibly suboptimal receiver
in a short time.