NXDAC
Eltvor announces the custom electronic board populated with the EVX12DS130B DAC and the nanoXplore NG-MEDIUM FPGA. The board combines these two rad-hard European components, and its design (schematics, PCB, HDL) will be made available under permissive license.
The main driver to build this board was the inability of previously existing kits of NX + E2V to interoperate. But also, for high-performance phase noise applications it was demanded NOT to have any PLL/synthesis on board, and also in order to support direct RF up-conversion, also no frequency dependent balun. Therefore in this design, the RF pairs (DAC clock in and DAC out) are routed to the user SMAs. The PCB is fully on RF substrate so the impedances shall be matched and loss low for higher RF applications.
The board comes with a demo where the NX FPGA synthesises a waveform at up to 1.2Gsps via the DAC. (1.6Gsps should be achievable with FPGA code optimization)
Below you can see a picture of the board. On the top there are expansion connectors for which there are already existing COTS ADC and DAC daughterboards by Eltvor.
