Gareth, I’m working on next-generation wideband digitizing with the Black Hole PIRE group. We at the U of Arizona have taken the approach of using the most readily available ADC, the one in the Xilinx RFSoCs. The platform is currently the ZCU111. We plan to migrate to its follow-on, the ZCU208. We’re currently exploring the feasibility of interleaving pairs of ADCs on these boards for 4 GHz RF bandwidth, by making our own input board that provides the necessary clock and signal processing. Others in the PIRE group are pursuing other brands of ADCs, but they also use a Xilinx development board to provide the DSP function.
When it gets to the point that we can’t get enough boards from Xilinx, the quantity will be high enough to justify designing and producing a CASPER version of the ZCU series. I don't have the wherewithal to do that board design, but I can provide input to the designers. On Monday, October 26, 2020 at 5:50:00 AM UTC-7 [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. > 2. 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. > 3. 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. > > 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) > > 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/8dee0003-f0d3-4d76-9880-8be777ef4b39n%40lists.berkeley.edu.
