New AXIe Modular Digitizers with Signal Processors for the Growing 5G Market

Guzik Technical Enterprises has introduced a new series of AXIe modular digitizers with combined signal processors for the emerging 5G communications test market. Based on a Keysight ADC and paired with Intel Arria 10 FPGAs, the new ADP7000 offers the fidelity, speed, and processing capability required by 5G wireless communications in one standard package.

According to Guzik, the ADP7000 Series has now broken the twin barriers of direct wideband RF signal conversion and processing power needed by advanced communications technologies such as 5G. By using a Keysight 10-bit ADC, unavailable on the open market, the company has been able to directly sample RF signals up to 32 GS/s on two channels simultaneously. Multiple ADP7000 modules can be combined to increase the number of phase-coherent channels. Each channel includes a precision front end for signal scaling with up to 10 GHz of analog bandwidth. The digitized data is routed to four Intel FPGAs, which include 13,504 multipliers and deliver a combined processing power of 6 TeraFLOPS.

Multiple real-time FPGA firmware options include digital down-conversion (DDC), frequency and phase equalization, baseband digital filtering and decimation, and periodic averaging functions for high dynamic range and low noise. The patented two channel real-time 32-GS/s DDC technology with equalization allows users to perform digital down-conversion in real-time. Combined with IF magnitude triggering, the combination allows users to store and analyze variable sub-bands of interest up to 2.5 GHz wide, with the IF magnitude triggering defining the start and stop points of the variable-length segmented acquisition.

System performance includes the ability to store up to 128 GB of acquisition data per module, and to offload the data to the AXIe chassis at up to 6.4 GB/s using a PCI Express x8 wide Gen3 link. Each ADP7000 comes with four optical data interfaces that deliver a combined throughput of 80 GB/s, allowing continuous real-time data streaming to storage. Alternatively, data may be streamed optically to additional signal processors, such as the Guzik DP7000 digital processor.

The Guzik Signal Analyzer Software Toolkit available for the series includes an IVI-compliant driver, a signal-display application, and a software development kit for integrating the ADP7000 into the customer’s existing software environment. It also integrates with several software packages from Keysight Technologies including the N8901A Infiniium hosted oscilloscope interface software for digitizers, the 89600 vector signal analyzer software, and the 81199A Wideband Waveform Analyzer Studio.

While Guzik ADP7104 offers DC to 10-GHz bandwidth in 2-channel mode, and 6.5 GHz bandwidth in 4-channel mode, the ADP7084 offers DC to 8 GHz bandwidth in 2-channel mode, and 4 GHz of bandwidth in 4-channel mode. Deliveries for the series are expected to begin in early 2018 with a retail tag of $100,000 USD. Click here to learn more.

Publisher: everything RF