The design of a10-Gsps analog-to-digital converter board for the radio astronomy community

Abstract

A 4-bit, 10 gigasamples per second (Gsps) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) printed circuit board (PCB) was designed and manufactured for digitizing radio telescopes. Associated with the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform developed by the Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) community, the developed PCB provides data acquisition systems with a wider bandwidth and simplifies the intermediate frequency (IF) section. The wider ADC bandwidth enables down converters in the IF section to be simplified, thereby saving resources. The current version of the PCB possesses an analog bandwidth of up to 5.9 GHz, whereas the chip possesses an analog bandwidth of to 18 GHz. This facilitates second and third Nyquist sampling using the revised PCB. Index Terms: analog-to-digital converter (ADC), fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA)