30 January 2012
250/500Ms/s serial output a/d converters simplify board layout
Intersil has announced what it claims to be the industry's fastest, lowest power single and dual channel 14bit a/d converters with JESD204B outputs.
The serial output a/d converters are designed to provide single channel sampling rates up to 500Ms/s and dual channel rates up to 250Ms/s.
The ISLA224S/ISLA214S50 series have an integrated JESD204B compatible transmitter that offers data rates up to 4.375Gb/s per lane, requiring only two lanes to support either the dual channel 14bit 250Ms/s converter (one lane per channel) or the single channel 14bit 500Ms/s device. An optional third lane is included in the transmitter to support the maximum sampling rate while operating the serial lanes at less than 3.125Gb/s, providing backwards compatibility with the JESD204A standard to support lower cost fpgas. The JESD204B transmitter is said to provide deterministic latency between the a/d converter sample clock and the serialised data stream. This meets the synchronisation requirements of multichannel and I/Q communications systems.
According to Intersil, power consumption for the ISLA224S25 is 980mW at 250Ms/s, compared with 1000mW or higher among competitive serial devices with lower sample rates. For the ISLA214S50, Intersil says power consumption is 1050mW compared with 2500mW for competing products.
The a/d converters feature a footprint of 7x7mm and are built using Intersil's FemtoCharge technology on a standard cmos process with the core from Intersil's ISLA224Pxx series. According to Intersil, this delivers best in class signal to noise ratio.
The ISLA224S and ISLA214S50 are optimal for high performance data acquisition and broadband communications systems. They are also suitable for high speed medical imaging systems, microwave receivers and radar or satellite antenna array processing. The integrated 8b/10b serialiser is designed to eliminate the need for an external serialising device, simplifying the design of serial data communications systems.
Intersil is offering an evaluation kit for use with the new a/d converters. It includes a modular hardware design, including a proprietary motherboard and interchangeable daughter cards, and Java-based software. The motherboard's fpga is available as a reference design for a SERDES receiver and the daughter cards are compliant with the VITA 57 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) standard, allowing it to also operate with FMC host cards such as the ML-605 from Xilinx.
Author
Chris Shaw
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.intersil.com/products/deviceinfo.asp?pn=ISLA214S50
http://www.intersil.com/products/deviceinfo.asp?pn=ISLA224S25
Companies
Intersil Corporation
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