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Altera_Forum
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10 years ago

deciding on hardware to purchase- need FPGA, DAC, and ADC

I am trying to use an FPGA with DAC and ADC to design a mutlifrequency lockin amplifier. I am trying to determine which board(s) or development kit(s) might be optimal.

I am currently working on implementing my design on a Cyclone III dev board with the DAC5681zEVM and ADS5560EVM connected to the FGPA via the HSMC connectors. We are having to install external termination resistors on the FPGA board to send the LVDS signals between the FGPA board and the ADC / DAC. We may also be limited by the frequency range of the ADC and DAC we have chosen.

Our desired operating range is ~3kHz to ~3MHz, although 10 or 100 kHz on the lower end would be ok. We are trying to develop this design to disseminate to others, and so would like to have components that are easy to set up and put together. Specifically it would be nice to have an FPGA board that already had the appropriate termination resistors so that others did not need to install such tiny resistors.

What suggestions do you have for a better hardware setup than the one we've chosen? What do you think of the Cyclone III DSP dev kit? Or the Stratix III DSP kit? What other options are there for a more straightforward setup with FPGA, DAC, and ADC than what I already have?

Thanks,

Erin

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