Speaker
Description
This talk presents the next revision of our open RFSoC4x2/GNU Radio high-bandwidth SDR architecture. Earlier versions demonstrated continuous RF sample offload to a host GNU Radio pipeline at sustained rates above 70 Gbit/s, enabling GPU-accelerated inspection of up to 2.4576 GHz of instantaneous bandwidth, and later extended the design into a bidirectional QSFP-based SDR transceiver.
The current update focuses on making the platform more usable as a general GNU Radio radio front end. A key change is replacing the previous XML-RPC control path with PYNQ.remote, moving RFSoC control into a host-side Python/GNU Radio workflow while using gRPC-backed remote access for overlay loading, MMIO, and RFDC parameter control. This provides a cleaner route for changing center frequency, DUC/DDC configuration, stream routing, and monitoring without maintaining a separate board-side RPC layer.
The RFDC clocking requirements for multi-tile synchronization also motivate a wider set of runtime sample-rate modes. Rather than rebuilding bitstreams for each operating point, the design uses runtime programmable DUC/DDC settings together with a clocking wizard to expose more flexible bandwidth and sample-rate options, constrained by the synchronized RF-ADC/RF-DAC tile clocks and downstream GNU Radio processing. We are also adding a PL DDR path for short RF sample burst captures, complementing continuous 100 GbE streaming when the host cannot sustain full-rate acquisition.
The talk will share implementation status, expected limitations, and remaining engineering work needed to keep the platform open, reproducible, and useful for spectrum monitoring, radio astronomy, instrumentation, and communications prototyping.
| Talk Length | 30 Minutes |
|---|---|
| Link to Open Source Code | https://github.com/strath-sdr/rfsoc_qsfp_offload |
| Acknowledge | Acknowledge In-Person |