Boards

What is an RFBuilder Board?

Within the RFBuilder framework, a board is refering the exact FPGA development board (not chip) that is being used. Each different board will have a different RF frontend and, therefore, requires a different initial setup. As seen in Getting Started, the board must be initialised first, and then passed into the RFBuilder instance.

Current Boards

RFSoC4x2

The RFSoC4x2 is currently the only supported board for the RFBuilder library.

The RFSoC4x2 has been the preferred hardware for this system as they are far cheaper to acquire compared to the traditional RFSoC boards. More specifically, RealDigital sells these boards for $2,499 USD when purchased under the AMD university program.

This RF front-end of this board contains the following hardware:

• 4 x 14-bit 5GSa/s Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs)
• 2 x 14-bit 9.85GSa/s Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs)

Note

The RFBuilder system is currently only configured to run the DACs at 8GSa/s per channel.