Guzik Technical Enterprises announced a new series of AXIe modular digitizers with combined signal processors, the ADP7000 series, for the emerging 5G communications test market and related applications. Based on a proprietary ADC (analog-to-digital converter) from Keysight Technologies, and paired with Intel Arria 10® FPGAs, the ADP7000 series offers unprecedented fidelity, speed and processing capability required by 5G wireless communications, in one standard package.
“With the ADP7000 series we have broken the twin barriers of direct wideband RF signal conversion and processing power needed by advanced communications technologies such as 5G,” said Lauri Viitas, vice president of Product and Business Development at Guzik. “By using a Keysight 10-bit ADC, unavailable on the open market, we are able to directly sample RF signals up to 32 Gsa/s (32 Gsamples/second) 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 (Trillion Floating Point Operations Per Second)."
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 Gsa/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 GBytes 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 performance of the ADP7000 series is simply breathtaking,” said Larry Desjardin, president of Modular Methods and a consultant in the industry. “Besides 5G, which it is well matched with, I expect it to also find its way into radar and EW (electronic warfare) applications. It delivers the critical combination of speed, processing and channel scalability needed in those applications.”
The Guzik Signal Analyzer Software Toolkit available for the ADP7000 series includes an IVI (Interchangeable Virtual Instrument) compliant driver, a Signal Display application, and a Software Development Kit for integrating the ADP7000 into the customer’s existing software environment. The ADP7000 series 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.
The 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. Prices start at $100K with deliveries in early 2018. Orders will be taken through the Keysight Technologies Application Engineering Organization.