This week’s Red Hot PCB is an RF digitizer for signals from an accelerated electron beam that will be used in an instrumentation system known as “Sirius”. Sirius is a 4th generation Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source that is part of the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) – a private, non-profit, research and development institution.
This beautiful board is known as an FMC250 that is a form factor and pin assignment standard focused in mezzanine for FPGA boards. It has four 16-bit channels up to 250 MS/s sampling rate, and is optimized for signals between 450-500 Mhz. The board operates mainly in subsampling mode and also generates its own reference clock that can be sourced from the front panel or from FMC pins CLK2_BIDIR and CLK3_BIDIR. The FMC pin CLK_DIR is connected to 3P3V via a 10KΩ pull up resistor to indicate that the CLK2_BIDIR and CLK3_BIDIR are driven from the carrier to the FMC mezzanine. These boards will be tested using a Rhode & Schwartz SMA100 generator for both signal and clock, and also a carrier FPGA board to acquire data and supply power. The Sirius instrumentation system will need 300 of these boards to operate!
Thank you to Gustavo Bruno with CNPEM-LNLS for his contribution on this week’s post!
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