Hi Gareth, On Mon, 26 Oct 2020 at 12:49, Gareth Callanan <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Casper Community > > Now that roach2 has been deprecated, I have been wondering where the > CASPER community is heading in terms of future ADC work. > > As far as I can tell there are three options available: > > 1. SNAP boards - The SNAP boards seem to support the largest number of > options 12 x 250 Msps/ 6 x 500 MSps or 3 x 1000 Msps. SNAP is used by HERA, > but I don't think it is used anywhere else. > > These are also used by a few other Berkeley and Berkeley-adjacent projects -- Breakthrough @ Parkes, the ATA. There also used by Caltech in the DSA. Possibly some other folk have them > > 1. SKARAB and the SKARAB ADC - The SKARAB ADC can sample at up to 3 > GSps. From what I can tell, it does not seem to be widely used. I imagine > it would be quite an expensive configuration. > 2. ZCU111 RFSoC - The ZCU111 RFSoC seems to be a good board for > experimentation, but if we wanted to build a many antenna array (N > 100), > XIlinx may not be quite able/willing to provide us with that many dev > boards. > > At the ATA we're pursuing a system using the HTG ZRF16 RFSoC platform. There are a bunch of Commercial RFSoC platforms, at various price points. The SKA-Low project was once looking at building a custom RFSoC platform. They also already have the Kintex Ultrascale iTPM which has 32 onboard ADC channels. > Alternatively, maybe there is some cheap FMC ADC out there that could make > everyone happy? (Although then we would need to find an FMC carrier card) > For the Caltech LWA352 system we're using a SNAP2 (dual FMC) with a custom ADC card. I believe a few people are experimenting with fast ADCs on FMC carriers with the VCU118/128. There are _lots_ of commercial platforms which would support FMC ADCs. The Institute of Automation (designers of the SNAP2) have a variety of FMC ADCs they use on their projects with various combinations of number-of-inputs and bandwidth / sample rate. Personally I think most deployments in the future will be on platforms which support 100G, so I can't imagine there will be a huge number of SNAPs used in the coming years. Just my random musings, Jack > > From the options available, it seems to me that SNAP is the board that is > most likely to be deployed in a large array, and the ZCU111 board is what > is most likely to be used in labs/small arrays. > > Is that a correct read of what is available? Or are there other projects > in the works? > > We have cheap COTS options for building X/F-Engines. As far as I can tell, > an easily accessible ADC board is the main bottleneck to quickly > prototyping/building a correlator. > > Gareth Callanan > Digital Signal Processing Engineer > South African Radio Astronomy Observatory(SARAO) > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups " > [email protected]" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/CA%2B1nFZTu1S3E%3DaH_KtvPE722UdW49HD0b3YeB07mZbGSGT_7Vw%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/CA%2B1nFZTu1S3E%3DaH_KtvPE722UdW49HD0b3YeB07mZbGSGT_7Vw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[email protected]" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/CAG1GKSkz1K6DtBP_C_1B6HOTx4D0crCb21O1SKM3k8ps2U_r%3DQ%40mail.gmail.com.
