Looking for a FPGA board

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Analog(ue) signal process normally involves a lot of Op Amps from which filters, multipliers, differentiators, integrators and similar can be constructed. No ADCs or DACs.

If you want to do digital signal processing, an FPGA with a lot of MAC blocks (such as the DSP48 in Xilinx FPGAs) is what you will need.

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Am 13.07.2011 08:50, schrieb Thomas Heller:

Of course I meant digital signal processing ;-). That is the point of the ADCs and DACs connected to the FPGA.

If it's a one off then probably not. But of it is anything more e.g. for an OEM manufacturing cycle we might be able to do something. We are working on a few things like this.

John Adair Enterpo> I'm looking for a FPGA OEM module for analog signal processing

_Dig_ through Xilinx's and Avnet's web pages. The last time I did real FPGA design Xilinx pointed you to Avnet for a Spartan 6 board, and that board had a dock for a daughter card, and Avnet had a _bazillion_ daughter cards.

A daughter card with ADC and DAC would be a no-brainer. At the speeds you're looking for, you should probably stick the keyword "video" into your search terms, look carefully at the data conversion hardware to make sure it isn't specific to some video mode, and make sure you're sitting down when you look at the price.

Here: this only misses your target price by a factor of 8:

This one is well within your price range, but I didn't look to see how fast the data conversion is:

You get the idea. Good luck.

This is an ambiguity in english language. Analog signal processing could be: a) analog processing of a signal b) processing of an analog signal

b) can be performed by digitization followed by digital processing

The standard example of this language construct is the "german prisoner of war camp", where you can't tell whether the prisoners or the guards are german.

Kolja

You would probably be best just to buy a card with an FMC connector and develop your own daughter board.

Jon

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Check terasic:

then any development kit which You like and can afford from Altera, which has HSMC connector.

Which is why they invented context.

Am 13.07.2011 20:44, schrieb maxascent:

FMC, PMC, XMC, HSMC - a lot of 'standards'. However, this is one possibility.

Thanks, Thomas

Am 14.07.2011 14:03, schrieb scrts:

These add-on boards really look useful!

Once I needed such a board several years ago, I bought an ADC evaluation board from linear technology, together with an so-called Fast DAAC evaluation kit, and modified them to support DC coupling, direct access to the build-in FPGA, and added a DAC myself as you can see in this photo (the dac in on the solder side of the board):

It was quite some work but worked fine in the end, but I would try to avoid this 'hack' in the future.

I found another thing that seems exactly what I need, and it is only 3 times the price that I had in mind (I must admit that my price expectations were somewhat naive):

USRP 200N from ettus research LLC: around 1500$, Spartan 3A DSP FPGA, dual 100 MS/s 14 bit ADC, dual 400 MS/s 16-bit DAC, DC coupled, 30 MHz Bandwidth, ...

Thanks again, Thomas

Maybe You're interested in software defined radio? I've got Stratix II GX devkit, so I'm also searching for good addon board with fast ADCs and DACs. That's why I've stopped at terasic site. Basically, now I am on the crossroad to buy a manufactured board or do my own. I have a hope to run four separate ADCs, each sampled from the same clock source, but +90deg phase. I am not sure if this approach would be correct. Just brainstorming now :)

If you're looking for a way to get quadrature demodulation when you can't get a fast enough ADC, that is certainly theoretically correct.

You run into problems with mismatch between the ADCs, though. With one fast ADC it's safe to assume that the sampling delay, offset, &c. of each "channel" is the same -- because it's all measured from the same ADC. You can't assume that when it's four ADCs, so you end up with offsets and phase shifts in your demodulated data.

And no, I don't know how much -- run the numbers yourself!!

Am 15.07.2011 02:01, schrieb scrts:

No, I'm planning to build some kind of lock-in amplifier: Measure the amplitude and phase of a signal in the presence of lots of noise. Totally different application than software defined radio, but it seems I need the same hardware for that.

Thomas

Can I correct for that by feeding in a clean signal, collecting a lot of data, and thinking about it?

Well, I suppose one fast ADC would be much better, but such fast device would cost a lot. Basically, I believe that if I would use four same chips, clock as mentioned before and set the adc_start_conversion command properly, then the delay, offset, etc, would be the same for them all and as mentioned in datasheet. E.g. cheap DSOs use the same technique, but I am not sure about ADC clock there.

I know that there has been some research in this area and this kind of technology is also commercially available. (Some people from another part of my university have started a quite successful company based on this kind of technology for example.)

Anyway, if you want to do this as a learning experience/hobbyist project or something similar I'd say go for it. You might want to search for papers on "time interleaved A/D converters" before deciding to do so though.

If you are doing this for commercial reasons you are probably better off buying a faster ADC since it will be a lot easier to get that working correctly than what you are proposing. You'll save yourself some development time and perhaps also some lawyer time (since I'm guessing that there are quite a few patents in this area that you would either have to work around or work out a licensing deal for).

Anyway, good luck with your project!

regards /Andreas