Fast / medium fast : AtoD & DtoA

[Dr.BeauWebber]

So the first thing that software radio and the like need is the Analogue to Digital and Digital to Analogue I/O.

I believe the available I/O pins on this system indicate that this I/O should go via the Xilinx FPGA on the Linux host board.
Does anyone have plans to either mate existing I/O hardware to this FPGA, or lay-out a new set of board/boards ?

My feelings are that we will need both a high-speed (say ~100MS.s-1 12 bit) version and a more modest serial I/O (say 1 MS.s-1 with possibly higher precision) version.
Cheers,
Beau

[theover]

Make it competative: there are great AD/DAs available from TI and Analog and probably others, which push the performance boundaries instead of becoming an average "raspberry for $25" approach. On the other hand, making a PCB with good converters needs to get paid..

[aolofsson]

Thanks for the post!

Here is a high level blog post we wrote some time back about SDR and the Parallella platform:
http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/sd ... arallella/

We will start prototyping SDR concepts in the near future with a dual site FMC card board, Zynz702:
http://www.analog.com/static/imported-f ... _FPGAs.pdf

The idea is to eventually shrink the whole prototype system down to a two credit card stacked board solution. Hopefully something will be up and running by the end of May.

With the 1GB/s bandwidth into the Parallella board from the GPIO connectors, it should be possible to make some very powerful systems. Heterogeneous computing is a big win here with three different powerful processing solutions (FPGA, ARM, and Epiphany) each focused on it's area of excellence. We owe everyone the specs for the daughter card format (still working out the exact pinout..)! As soon things stabilize will start collaborating with groups on an SDR specific daughter card.

[9600]

When it comes to thinking about implementing digital down-conversion etc. in the FPGA there may be open source code we can reuse from the and .

In terms of GNU Radio and getting the signal processing blocks to make use of the Epiphany, I wonder if anything could be learnt from prior work with the and (~5M PDF).

[tnt]

Checkout http://myriadrf.org/

I'm planning to connect that when my parallella gets here ...

[9600]

[tnt]

[grahamh]

That board uses the Lime Micro transceiver chip.
12 bit A->D, D-A at up to 40 Msps.

http://www.limemicro.com/download/LMS60 ... -1.2r0.pdf

Unfortunately Lime Micro is very "proud" of their chips at this time,
and is charging accordingly.

--- Graham

==

[theover]

Small-mass production of a nice TI/BB or AD AD and DA converter board is probably hard to design (analog part especially), but shouldn't need to be very expensive..

[ipse]