Procurement of Deployable Asymmetrical ISAC Testbed

The National Institute of Standards and Technology seeks procurement of one fully integrated, deployable asymmetrical Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) testbed, with quotations due July 15, 2026. This is a 100% women-owned small business set-aside with a firm fixed-price purchase order under simplified acquisition procedures.

Place of performance is NIST's Gaithersburg, Maryland campus with FOB Destination delivery required by December 31, 2026. The testbed comprises two enterprise servers (Transmit/Protocol Server C1 and ISAC Sensor Server C2), two software-defined radios (USRP X420 or equivalent), a clock distribution hub with GPS-disciplined oscillator, RF interconnects, eight antennas for Ku-Band and X-Band frequencies, and a mobile 19-inch EIA standard rack enclosure on casters not exceeding 48 inches in height. The system must operate on 120V/20A power and include a minimum 2200 VA UPS with 5-minute runtime.

Each server requires a 24-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO processor (or enterprise equivalent), 128 GB DDR5 ECC RAM, dual-port 100 GbE ConnectX NIC with DPDK support, 4 TB NVMe RAID 0 array sustaining 6.0 GB/s sequential writes, and 16 TB archival HDD. The C2 sensor server additionally requires an NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell GPU with minimum 48 GB GDDR7 memory, 14,080 CUDA cores, and 1,344 GB/s memory bandwidth. Acoustic output must not exceed 50 dBA at idle and 60 dBA under full load. All equipment must be new commercial products; prototypes, demonstrations, used, or refurbished instruments are excluded.

Contractor must possess an ECCN and maintain active SAM.gov registration at time of award. The contractor shall provide one-year comprehensive warranty covering integration and workmanship, with all original equipment manufacturer warranties passing through to NIST. Government acceptance testing occurs within 30 business days of delivery and includes BIOS verification, storage throughput benchmarking, 100 GbE connectivity and SDR synchronization verification, and 6 GB/s data capture validation. Payment is Net 30 upon successful Government acceptance. Evaluation emphasizes technical capability as the primary factor with price as secondary; award will be made on best-value basis without discussions if initial quotations justify such action. NAICS code is 541519; PSC code is 6640.