X3-SD16 Data Acquisition Board with 16x 144ksps Adc, 16x 192ksps Dac and Spartan 3A FPGA
The X3-SD16 is an XMC IO module that can be fitted in a PC using a XMC to PCIe adapter or XMC to PCI adapter or a CompactPCI chassis using a XMC to CompactPCI adapter or a Standalone PC. Other hosting options include a standalone eInstrument and connection to a variety of PC hosts.
The data acquisition board has 16 channels of simultaneous 24 bit analogue to digital converters delta-sigma. The maximum sample rate is 144ksps. The analogue to digital converters have built in a lowpass filter with cutoff at half the samplerate, and a programmable gain amplifier which gives input ranges of +/-1V, +/-5V and +/-10V. The converter (ADS1278) is a delta-sigma device.
The board also has 16 channels of simultaneous 24 bit digital to analogue converters. These can be clocked at upto 192ksps and have built in lowpass filters and voltage range +/-2V. Samples can be streamed from the host via the memory direct to the DACs.
The X3-SD16 has an onboard PLL which can be driven by an onboard reference oscillator or by an offboard reference clock. Alternately the user can supply an external clock. Triggering of the start of samples can be done by software or an external active high LVTTL signal.
The X3-SD16 also has 44 bits of user digital IO. This can be read or written to as a 32 bit register from the host, or if the user modifies the logic, can be used to interface to a variety of digital devices such as serial, parallel ports, I2C devices etc. The Spartan3 device supports LVTTL.
Data acquisition control, signal processing, buffering, and system interface functions are implemented in a Xilinx Spartan3A DSP FPGA, 1.8M gate device. Two 512Kx32 memory devices are used for data buffering and FPGA computing memory. The data acquisition board has a single lane PCI Express interface to the host which can sustain 160MB/s to the host.
The X3-SD16 is supported by Malibu, a set of C++ libraries to use the board under Windows and Linux. This includes example programs to use the board to setup the logic, acquire samples and stream them to disk, and a Wave program to stream samples from host to Dacs.
The logic can be fully customized using VHDL and MATLAB using the FrameWork Logic toolset. The MATLAB BSP supports real-time hardware-in-the-loop development using the graphical, block diagram Simulink environment with Xilinx System Generator.
