Speaker
Description
We present a novel radio development platform with special customization features designed for a range of software-defined radio applications. The "Sparrow" board has been inspired by radio astronomy research and is a high-speed, dual input data acquisition system capable of digitizing signals with bandwidths up to 400 MHz. The mainboard is a baseband receiver that comes with a horizontally attached mezzanine card that can house a multi-channel high-speed DAC for TX functionality or other RF signal processing. The platform also relies on silent switching DC converters for ultra-low-noise applications.
Sparrow is based on the Zynq-7000 ARM/FPGA SoC and is compatible with the XC7Z030/35/45 chips. One of the main advances of this platform is its synchronization capabilities. In addition to 1PPS and reference inputs, the board can be locked to a White-Rabbit timing distribution system, enabling sub-nanosecond synchronization of multiple boards. It features four SFP+ ports - allowing up to 40 Gb/s of streaming output - as well an RJ45 Ethernet port, USB, and an SD card.
Sparrow has been developed to plug into RF daughterboards, with several reference designs being developed, including an 8GHz downconverter as well as an IQ board. Most importantly, our goal is to make the KiCAD-6 design files of the mezzanine cards and daughterboards completely open-source allowing users to modify or design their own.
| Talk Length | 15 Minutes |
|---|---|
| Acknowledge | Acknowledge In-Person |
