6U-high FPGA-based analyzers reduce 2G-sample/sec data as fast as it arrives

摘要

sAYS PHIL GREGOR, product manager at Ac-qiris, which manufactures modular, highspeed data-conversion instruments, "Acquiring long records of wide-bandwidth analog signals at rates as high as 2G samples/sec is only part of the problem that many engineers who deal with such signals have to solve." To be useful in real-time applications--which range from radar-signal processing, mass spectrometry, and millimeter-spectroscopy analysis, to acoustic microscopy and interferometer-signal processing-he says, many setups that perform direct sampling must filter and reduce the data as rapidly as it arrives. Such setups often require greater processing speed than familiar computing architectures can provide. Although FPGA-based analyzers that offer the necessary speed have existed for several years, they haven't offered the user programmability that many applications require.