7GHz ADC-DAC card honed for FPGA software-defined radio

Abaco Systems latest analogue front-end mezzanine card for FPGAs has been tailored for software defined radio, as well as electronic warfare, radar, test and measurement.

FMC300, as it will be known, has 7GHz of usable analogue bandwidth, claims the company, with multiple channels offering up to 12bit 6Gsample/s ADC and up to 16bit 12Gsample/s DAC through a JESD204B/C interface.

Data conversion comes from Analog Devices analogue front-end ICs – there is a choice of:

AD9081 (quad 16bit 12Gsample/s DAC, quad, 12bit, 4Gsample/s ADC) or
AD9082 (quad 16bit 12Gsample/s DAC, dual 12bit 6Gsample/s ADC)

“When paired with FPGA carrier cards such as the VP891, FMC300 gives customers the platform to solve the most difficult challenges when designing modern DSP systems,” according to Abaco.

VP891 is the company’s configurable processor board with a Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ or Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA. It supports 40 and 100Gbit Ethernet data plane, PCIe Gen3 x4 expansion plane and 10Gbit Ethernet control plane connections to a host computer. Options include dual 100Gbit Ethernet optical interfaces.

High-speed interfacing for the front-end board is handled through a VITA 57.4 connector.

The board has options for clock source, sampling frequency and calibration, and has individual calibration circuits for fine-tuning of gain, offset and phase, said Abaco.

Formed over 30 years ago, Abaco Systems (part of Ametek) is headquartered in Huntsville Alabama. It has manufacturing in Huntsville, and Towcester UK.