Is the Gizmo2 suitable for high speed data acquistion?

Question

Hello.

My area of interest is high speed data acquisition.I'd like to connect a quad or octal high speed ADC (serial LVDS output) running at speeds from say 25 MSPS to 125 MSPS per channel.

For the quad serial LVDS output ADC , need about 20 output lines. I saw on the following link (http://www.gizmosphere.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/AMD_GIZMO2_Development_Board_Schematic.pdf) a block diagram of the Gizmo2, which appears to have only 8 GPIO lines.

wonder how it might be possible to use the PCIe edge connectors or SATA connectors to interface the ADC to the Gizmo2.

Maybe it's simply not possible to interface such ADCs directly to Gizmo2 and instead will require a seperate FPGA board, some high speed ADC board custom design to interface with the FGPA board and then try and interface the combined FPGA + ADC module to the Gizmo. Getting rather complicated.

I would appreciate your thoughts on this please.

Thanks.

Regards,

Will.

michaelkellett · Answer

An 8 channel ADC at 125Ms/S = 1Gbyte/S at 8 bits or 2 Gbyte/S at 16 bits. That's equivalent to one or two 10Gbit Ethernet ports - you are not going to make sense of this amount of data (or do anything with it) with a tiny processor like the Gizmo. About the only way to get this amount of data from ADC into memory and then computer is by using an FPGA for the glue and multi-lane PCIe or possibly multiple 10Gbit ethernet ports. At the bottom end of your speed range it's only 200Mbyte/S - still too much for tiny processors and Gbit Ethernet but easier on PCIe or possibly UltraSpeed USB. At this lower rate SATA is possible but difficult - because now your ADC and FPGA have to pretend to be a disk drive. Think in terms of medium size FPGA, more than £10k on FPGA design tools, buying in some IP for UltraSpeed USB or Gbit Ethernet and 2000 hours of development effort. If you only want one just buy it. https://www.picotech.com/oscilloscope/4824/8-channel-oscilloscope If you want to pay for a design .............. MK

clem57 · Answer

If you really want to play with these speeds, I recommend the Mojo FPGA package as a relatively low cost yet capable processor. Usually with that rate, a trigger should be setup to record only the necessary data or output it as a scope. @ wf215 please let us know how you go with this interesting project