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Suggestions for digitizer design

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curious_77

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I am interested in designing a high speed digitizer (250 msps, 10-12 bits).
I want to be able to put my design on a small PCB that I can attach to a bigger test board. Due to various reasons, I am unable to use boards from NI or Textronics. From my research so far, the board will have a high speed ADC and most probably a FPGA to store data and transmit it serially to a PC. I have some questions for you guys

1. For a novice designer, is the circuit design and layout going to be hard?

2. I consider the FPGA to be my biggest hurdle. Can you suggest a good FPGA kit that I can practice on?
 

Hi,

1. For a novice designer, is the circuit design and layout going to be hard?
Click to expand...

Definitely YES! If you mean 250 Mega samles per second (or do you mean 250 millisamples per second?)

I don´t think it is a good idea for a novice designer. It´s actually a challenge for an experienced designer..


I´d expect problems with:
* analog input circuit for that high frequency
* FPGA design for that high data throughput
* board layout

Klaus
 
Thanks for your reply and your response is exactly what i feared!
I am not entirely a novice designer.I just haven't worked on high-speed designs. This is a side project, so i am not rushed for time. Even if i can't get it to work very well, my goal is to use this project to gain some high-speed design experience and more importantly working with FPGA.
Can you suggest some starting steps that i can take? Would it be a good idea to get a beginner's FPGA kit?
 

You can save a lot of design work by using an FPGA kit with a high-speed interface (like multi channel LVDS) suitable for ADC connection and make a sutable ADC front-end board if you don't want to refer to an existing plug-in board.
 
Hi,

A FPGA kit is always a good point to start

What experience do you have?

Klaus
 
Have a look at the 'Hermes' SDR project from TAPR, 125MS/s 16 bits (Probably not quite 16 bits ENOB), output is ethernet.
The front end may be of interest.

73 Dan.
 
The Hermes SDR project will definitely be helpful, especially Mercury module, once i am comfortable with FPGAs.

Can you suggest a good FPGA starter kit?
 

Hi,

we use a NEXYS3 with XILINX Spartan6 on it.
For us it is quite good, but i can not compare with others.

Hope this helps

Klaus
 
Thanks!
Can you also suggest any online resource or book which is good for a FPGA beginner?
 

curious_77 said:
Can you also suggest any online resource or book which is good for a FPGA beginner?
Click to expand...

It depends on the HDL you wish to study,

For VHDL:

FPGA Prototyping by VHDL Examples: Xilinx Spartan-3 Version

Circuit Design and Simulation with VHDL

The Designer's Guide to VHDL, Third Edition


For Verilog:

FPGA Prototyping By Verilog Examples: Xilinx Spartan-3 Version

Verilog HDL

Verilog for Digital Design


There are a number of online tutorials available for both VHDL and Verilog, I would recommend Googling for the appropriate keywords.


BigDog
 
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