Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] [USRP-users] FPGA devkit using HSMC/FMC RF board?

[Tomas Daujotas]

Hi,
I am interested in designing such HSMC/FMC board, which would be way
much cheaper than AD one, however I am still under investigation on the
best approach of RF frontend. Either AD transceiver or LimeMicro
transceiver would be a good solution, also need to mention a common ADC
approach, however I need people input regarding what would be attractive
for engineers, hobbyists and other developers. If anyone is interested,
please reply me privately, since this is a bit offtopic.

Are you talking about designing an OpenHardware PCB?

Correct. I use Altium for my contract works, now I must use Allegro at current job, however for that purpose I suppose I would need to learn KiCad or something similar.

 

It would be nice to have something that can be plugged on http://zedboard.org/product/microzed, doesn't cost that much and provides way better perf than the usual RTL/SDR.

 We have many things to choose from:

MicroZed with Z7010 costs 199USD and 289USD for Z7020 version: http://zedboard.org/product/microzed

Paralella has Z7010 plus 16 core microprocessor and costs 99USD only. Too bad we need to wait to order it. http://www.adapteva.com/parallella-board/

I am mostly familiar with Altera, so its SoCKIT costs 299USD, but it has a huuuge FPGA (115k LEs) and in addition to above ones, it has VGA out and audio out: http://www.rocketboards.org/foswiki/Documentation/ArrowSoCKitEvaluationBoard

There's also DE1-SoC, which has a slightly smaller 85k LEs FPGA: http://www.terasic.com.tw/cgi-bin/page/archive.pl?Language=English&CategoryNo=167&No=836&PartNo=1

What do you have in mind in term of specs, number of rx/tx, ...?

Bandwidth, MSPS, no of RX/TX and other parameters. Well, it's basically choosing a transceiver or a pair of ADC and DAC.

BR

Tomas Daujotas