Serial QDR LVDS High-Speed ADCs on Xilinx Series 7 FPGAs

Abstract

High-speed ADCs are widely used in the metrology field, and in order to read and process the amount of data delivered from them, FPGA usage is presented as an optimal platform to give solution to this kind of applications, due the inclusion of advanced hard block resources such as communication interfaces, Gigabit transceivers, SerializerlDeserializer, clock managers, among others. In this paper, we propose a method to interface Serial High-Speed ADCs using Quadruple Data Rate Low Voltage Differential Signalling interfaces. Support was given to FMC16x boards from Abaco Systems, based on a Texas Instruments ADS42LB69 ADC of 16-bit @ 250 MS/s, using the Xilinx ZC706 board. The design was inspired in Xilinx application notes, which are revised, and is mainly based on the use of specific primitives of the 7 Series. The development of the core and a validation system are described, as well as tests related to getting data with a Python script from the PC, calculation of the Fast Fourier Transform and plot of the obtained samples.