High-speed FPGA development board aids product development

29 January 2003 Manufacturing / Production Technology, Hardware & Services

The RaDiCom Group at the University of Pretoria develops a variety of signal processing building blocks in software (VHDL, C++) and hardware and also performs the integration of these blocks to satisfy the needs and required specifications for clients. The RaDiCom Group comprises Prof Louis Linde, Willie Malan, Frans Marx, and Francois Pienaar.

The RaDiCom Group has developed a high speed FPGA development board that consists of four Altera 20K600EBC652-2X devices, six 80 MSPS digital-to-analog converters, two 40 MSPS DACs, two 80 MSPS analog-to-digital converters, four VGA ports, nine TTL (BNC) ports, an ISA slot, etc. The development board has a system clock of 80 MHz, which is also supplied as a buffered output from the board. It also has an external system clock input, allowing it to run under 80 MHz.

According to the team, these development boards were successfully used as platforms to develop a number of different communication products, including a spectrally-efficient ultra high speed narrow-band microwave modem, a power efficient direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) modem producing a constant envelope output signal, BPSK, QPSK and 4-QPSK modems, etc. The hardware implementation of the high speed microwave modem incorporated the development of several complex high speed DSP building blocks, including an intermediate-frequency (IF) sampling interface, numerically-controlled oscillator (NCO) and demodulator blocks running at a clock speed of 80 MHz; a decision-feedback equaliser (DFE) running at 20 MHz (partially 80 MHz), an 80 MHz Viterbi coder/decoder; 80 MHz complex correlators, encoders/decoders, high speed digital filters, etc.

The DSSS modem consists of blocks such as complex numerically-controlled code generators (NCCG), Costas decision-directed carrier recovery loops (CDDCRL), coherent decision-directed (DD) complex delay-locked-loops (DLL), code and carrier acquisition blocks, IF-sampling, NCO, encoders/decoders, etc.

Other products which are also offered by the RaDiCom group include, amongst others, a PCI-based fast Fourier transform (FFT) card, standalone or PCI-based bit error rate (BER) data analyser and a PCI-based digital DSSS modem card.

For more information contact Willie Malan, 012 420 2060, [email protected] or Prof Louis Linde, 012 420 2168, [email protected]

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