Mezzanine card acquires at up to 12.5Gbit/s

Designed for high speed data acquisition applications, the ICS-8550 can simultaneously sample two RF/IF inputs at frequencies up to 210MHz at a resolution of 12bit without data loss.

Responding to customer demand for higher sampling frequencies, higher performance and greater flexibility, ICS Sensor Processing - part of Radstone Embedded Computing - has released the ICS-8550 ADC XMC module.

Designed for high speed data acquisition applications such as software defined radio, Sigint, tactical communications and radar, the ICS-8550 - which is available for both benign and rugged environments - can simultaneously sample two RF/IF inputs at frequencies up to 210MHz at a resolution of 12bit without data loss: total aggregate I/O bandwidth is 12.5Gbit/s.

The XMC interface makes the ICS-8550 an ideal partner for XMC-equipped single board computers such as Radstone's new V4DSP hybrid FPGA/PowerPC processor.

Onboard processing is provided by a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA, enabling algorithms such as digital downconversion (wide- or narrowband), FFT and filtering to be executed at the highest speed possible.

"The ICS-8550 really pushes the performance boundaries in applications such as software defined radio, and is a further demonstration of our leadership in rugged signal conversion applications", said Scott Hames, Director of Product Management at ICS Sensor Processing.

"The combination of eight lanes of high speed serial I/O via the XMC connector, state of the art analogue to digital conversion and the power and flexibility of the Virtex-4 gives us a solution which is unmatched in the industry".

Analogue to digital conversion is provided by two Analog Devices AD9430 convertors, and the onboard Xilinx Virtex-4 means that IF/UHF signals can be processed directly on the ICS-8550 board itself, freeing the host board for other tasks.

Some 95% of the Virtex-4's resources are available for user applications.

As well as the high-speed serial connection offered by the XMC interface - which, dependent on the protocols used, could give throughput in excess of 1Gbyte/s - the ICS-8550 features a 64bit/66MHz PCI interface supporting sustained aggregate datarates in excess of 400Mbyte/s.

The Pn4 I/O port allows the user to define direct point to point communications, eliminating interrupt latencies.

ICS also provides a complete hardware development kit for the Xilinx ISE Foundation development environment, together with drivers for VxWorks, Linux and Windows.

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