PX1500-4 – 1.5 GS/s 4 Channel or 3.0 GS/s 2 Channel, 8 bit, PCIe x8, Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA, Digitizer Board

The transformer connection can only be set for AC coupled operation and has a frequency capture range of 5 MHz to 2 GHz. The amplifier can be set for either AC or DC coupled operation with a frequency range of up to 1 GHz.

The board features an 8 lane PCI Express connection to the computer host as well as 2 gigabytes of on-board memory. If the average acquisition data rate does not exceed 1400 MB/s then the entire 2 GB memory may be used as an exceptionally large FIFO for acquiring non-stop, continuous data directly to the PCI Express bus. Significant test data has shown that recording with large FIFO buffering can be continuous at these rates even when operating in traditional non real-time environments such as the Windows operating system.

The PX1500-4 employs two Virtex-5 FPGAs which have ample unused programmable logic cells for customers to implement their own custom in-line signal processing (as an option). Hooks and examples are provided to simplify this task.

The PX1500-4 was designed to maximize the quality of the captured signal in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and spurious-free dynamic range over a very wide frequency range. For this reason, there are no switch components in the analog signal path or bandwidth limiting programmable gain amplifiers; giving customers the benefit of a nearly direct path to the ADC from either the amplifier or transformer coupled input.

A frequency synthesized clock allows the ADC sampling rate to be set to virtually any value from 200 MHz, the minimum allowable ADC clock, to 1500 MHz, offering maximum flexibility for sampling rate selection. This frequency selection flexibility comes at no cost to the acquisition clock quality/performance when locked to either the onboard 10 MHz, 5 PPM reference clock or to an externally provided 10 MHz reference clock. The ADC may also be clocked from an external clock source.

Up to two PX1500-4 boards may be interconnected in a Master/Slave configuration via a ribbon cable that connects at the top of the board. In this configuration the clock and trigger signals from the Master drive the Slave boards so that data sampling on all boards occurs simultaneously up to 500MHz. Up to six boards can be set up for fully synchronized operation up to 1.5GHz by utilizing the SYNC1500-6 as the clock and trigger source for the system.