The Control & Down Conversion (CDC) cards are the first electronic components inside the shielded container for EMBRACE. Signals from the tiles arrive by coaxial cable into the container and are connected to the CDC cards. These cards combine the signals of four tiles into a tileset and the resulting combined signal is downconverted in frequency and sent along to the Remote Control Unit (RCU) and the Remote Station Processing (RSP) boards. From then on, the signal processing is very similar to the LOFAR signal path. The CDC cards are also responsible for uploading configuration settings to the EMBRACE tiles.

The EMBRACE signal path is described in detail by Philippe Picard in the Proceedings of Wide Field Science and Technology for the SKA (2010, S.A. Torchinsky, et al. (eds).