Re: 400 Mb/s ADC

"Jeff Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> We are building a new radio telescope called PAST
> (http://astrophysics.phys.cmu.edu/~jbp/past6.pdf)
> which we will install at the South Pole or in Western China.
>
> To make this work, will need to sample (6 to 8 bit precision) dozens
> of analog voltages at 400 Msample/sec and feed these data streams into
> PCs. One PC per sampler.
>
> The flash ADCs we need are available (Maxim), but we are finding it
> difficult to get the data into the PC.
>
> One simple way would be to use SCSI ultra640, but so far I have not
> found any 640 adapters on the market.  Is any 640 adapter available?
> anything coming soon?
>
> or we could go right into a PCI-X bus.  has anyone out there
> done this at 400 Mb/s?  is this hard to do? FPGA core liscense
> for this seems expensive ($9K), with no guarentee of 400 mByte rates.
>
> is there a better way?
>
> thanks
>
> -Jeff Peterson


Why dont you get an AGP Graphics processor, and try to connect your ADCs to
the GPU Memory Bus.
Run a PCI card for graphics on the PC.

The GPUs are programmable , so you might even be able to do some processing
inside...

Since you only need 400 MSamples/S, you could live with the Maxims.

If you want to get some real speed, then maybe something like the Atmel
TS8308500 (500 Mspl/s), TS8388B (1 Gspl/s) or TS83102G0B (Gspl/s) could be
of interest.
Going up to Giga Samples per second, would make your problem worse though
:-)

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/datasheets.asp?family_id=611

-- 
Best Regards
Ulf at atmel dot com
These comments are intended to be my own opinion and they
may, or may not be shared by my employer, Atmel Sweden.