hi gareth, can you tell us a bit more about your project? sample rate? number of ADC bits? number of ADC's? ADC analog bandwidth ? then people might be able to provide better advice.
some random thoughts: you probably know the SNAP board has a ZDOC connector on it, so the old CASPER ZDOC ADC's can plug into SNAP (except for the dual ZDOC 64 ADC board), see ADC list at https://github.com/casper-astro/casper-hardware#casper-hardware but casper doesn't have all the yellow blocks for all of these ADC boards to run on SNAP - you might need to do some yellow block development, depending on which ADC board you want. if this is for a correlator, and you want to use an RFSOC board, make sure that board can sync with other RFSOC boards so all the boards sample at the same phase. the 8 input ZCU111 board can not sync with other boards, but the ZCU216 can. i think most of the newer commercial RFSOC boards can sync. mitch has evaluated several of RFSOC boards and has tested a few boards for sync capabiltity. if you want a cheap 4 Gsps dual 12 bit RFSOC board, xilinx has a $2K RFSOC education board they said they could make this board available at high quantities to casper collaborators. there's a quad 15 Gsps 4 bit FMC ADC board developed by jonathan weintroub's group and rick_raffanti. wei liu is working on a yellow block for this board. and there's a single 15 Gsps 4 bit board developed by ASIAA. there is a dual ~5Gsps, or single ~10Gsps ~12 bit TI ADC board developed by JPL. there's a dual 10.6 Gsps ~10 bit AD ADC board under development at GBO. best wishes, dan Dan Werthimer Marilyn and Watson Alberts Chair Astronomy Dept and Space Sciences Lab University of California, Berkeley On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 5:50 AM Gareth Callanan <gcalla...@ska.ac.za> 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 " > casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. > 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 "casper@lists.berkeley.edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to casper+unsubscr...@lists.berkeley.edu. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/lists.berkeley.edu/d/msgid/casper/CAGHS_vF6a5wGUy1%2Bp2MPPWO52uyBxouqDSZZ58tWcCpuw0D1qA%40mail.gmail.com.
