FMC-518

The FMC-518 is a quad channel 500 MSPS 14-bit analog input FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC). The FMC-518, Quad Channel Analog FMC provides high-speed, low latency, high-performance functionality necessary for applications such as Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), Electronic Warfare (EW) and RADAR (including beamforming) through the density, speed and resolution of the data delivered to the FPGA host through the FMC-518. The FMC (VITA 57) specification allows I/O devices to be directly coupled to a host FPGA. This makes the FMC-518 an ideal digital receiver front end. On the FMC-518, the four ADC devices connect through the high bandwidth FMC connector to an FPGA-based host board which maximizes data throughput and minimizes latency.

The FMC-518, available in rugged air and conduction-cooled variations, can be synchronized with multiple FMC-518 modules to provide coherent sampling for a scalable solution.

The FMC-518 supports an onboard programmable sample clock generator as well as an external reference input. Multiple FMC-518 boards can be synchronized to increase the number of input channels through the use of trigger input/output signals directly under the control of the FPGA. The FMC-518 can be used on platforms like Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions’ VPX6-473 (Triple Xilinx Virtex-7 with Zynq), VPX6-474 (Xilinx Virtex-7), FPE650 (quad Xilinx Virtex-5) which provides processor nodes for a powerful digital receiver platform.

The FMC-518 supports four analog inputs through 50Ω MMCX type front panel connectors. The analog inputs are single-ended and are coupled to Intersil ISLA214P50 ADCs using a balun and AC coupling capacitor configuration to produce the broadband differential input required by the devices.