jxw
Newbie level 3
Can anyone suggest what would be some better ways(purchased with minimal work if possible) to generate square waves at 3 tunable voltage levels toggling arbitrarily from one voltage to the other at high speed from 500 MHz to 1 GHz? (ex: 0.1V, 1.5V, 1.5V, 0.1V, 0.35V, 0.1V 1.5V, 0.35V)
I have a Xilinx Kintex 7 KC705 eval kit and can purchase add on boards- the one way I was thinking of that is more conceptually straightforward is to just use a DAC board and drive the outputs at the desired voltages. https://www.abaco.com/products/fmc170-fpga-mezzanine-card are ok for a few hundred MHz, but none of the cards can get a ~10-20% of the cycle rise/fall time at 1GHz. For 1GHz arbitrary square waves with say 0.2ns rise/fall times, need about 3.5GHz minimum to get anything, then about >15GHz of analog bandwidth to make it appear "more square". For 500MHz, about ~ 8-10GHz (maybe 5GHz and a less square appearance) analog output bandwith may be ok.
Effectively that is an AWG....Am I thinking about this the wrong way? I don't need all the fancy features of an AWG, but just able to set 3 voltages (0.1V, 0.35V 1.5V) and toggle between then arbitrarily (ideally driven by data patterns out of the Kintex FPGA).
Thanks for your help!
I have a Xilinx Kintex 7 KC705 eval kit and can purchase add on boards- the one way I was thinking of that is more conceptually straightforward is to just use a DAC board and drive the outputs at the desired voltages. https://www.abaco.com/products/fmc170-fpga-mezzanine-card are ok for a few hundred MHz, but none of the cards can get a ~10-20% of the cycle rise/fall time at 1GHz. For 1GHz arbitrary square waves with say 0.2ns rise/fall times, need about 3.5GHz minimum to get anything, then about >15GHz of analog bandwidth to make it appear "more square". For 500MHz, about ~ 8-10GHz (maybe 5GHz and a less square appearance) analog output bandwith may be ok.
Effectively that is an AWG....Am I thinking about this the wrong way? I don't need all the fancy features of an AWG, but just able to set 3 voltages (0.1V, 0.35V 1.5V) and toggle between then arbitrarily (ideally driven by data patterns out of the Kintex FPGA).
Thanks for your help!