Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] [USRP-users] FPGA devkit using HSMC/FMC RF board?

[Tomas Daujotas]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Petter Gustad <address@hidden> wrote:

Did anybody port USRP/GnuRadio to a FPGA development-kit (presumably
based on an Altera SoC or Xilinx Zynq) using a HSMC or FMC RF
mezzanine board like the AD-FMCOMMS2-EBZ(1)?

Thanks
Best regards
//Petter

1) http://www.analog.com/en/evaluation/eval-ad-fmcomms2/eb.html

Hi,

I am interested in designing such HSMC/FMC board, which would be way much cheaper than AD one, however I am still under investigation on the best approach of RF frontend. Either AD transceiver or LimeMicro transceiver would be a good solution, also need to mention a common ADC approach, however I need people input regarding what would be attractive for engineers, hobbyists and other developers. If anyone is interested, please reply me privately, since this is a bit offtopic.

Answering the post:

I haven't seen any approaches to implement devkit to GNU Radio. It actually depends on how would you like to do it. There are couple of possible solutions:

1. Use USB. Probably all of these devkits have USB OTG connected to microprocessor part of the FPGA.

2. Use GBit Ethernet. It would be probably the easiest approach, since it is possible to emulate USRP?

3. Run Linux on SoC and pass the information directly from the FPGA to the microprocessor. This enables huge bandwidth, however the microprocessor part may be too slow to process all the data and the bigger part has to be done on the FPGA. The Xillinux distribution is able to run Linux on a SoC and also it has a kernel driver to pass the data from the FPGA to the microprocessor (probably through a DMA).

BR

Tomas Daujotas