Oscilloscope , High speed Application

[Altera_Forum]

Hi, I am wondering to know if the DE0 nano board will be a good choose for connecting it to an external High Speed ADC (20-30MSPS) and visualize the signal in real time using DSP builder (simulink). 

 I know that the Speed of the Cyclone IV would be enough for communication with the external ADC, but I am afraid that the USB Blaster will not be enough to transfer the signal to plot the data on the PC. In oder words, I want to convert the DE0 nano into an oscilloscope using the PC for visualization and an External ADC for data acquisition.   Is this possible? any suggestion?  thanks

[Altera_Forum]

The USB-Blaster is too slow for this application. 

 You will need to use the DE0-nano headers to interface to both your ADC and some other form of communications to your PC.  For example, FTDI have modules with their FT2232H high-speed  http://www.ftdichip.com/products/ics/ft2232h.htm  device on it. Perhaps you could build an adapter board to interface something like this with the DE0-nano.  Alternatively, you could operate your ADC in 'snapshot' mode, where you trigger, capture data to DE0-nano memory, and then transfer it to the PC at a much slower rate.  I'd recommend starting with the 'snapshot' mode since it requires no extra hardware, and then once you have the ADC interface working, decide how to proceed to speed-up the data transfer to the host.  Cheers, Dave

[Altera_Forum]

Hi Dave. 

 The 'snapshot' mode sounds as alternative. Basically it will work as those Lecroy Oscilloscopes connected to the PC that record the signal and then transfer the data to the PC.   One more issue Dave. What cold you said about the memory of the DE0nano in terms of amount of data that can be stored in terms of micro seconds? i.e can I record data up to 6.4935e-05 seconds?  Cheers

[Altera_Forum]

--- Quote Start ---   What cold you said about the memory of the DE0nano in terms of amount of data that can be stored in terms of micro seconds? i.e can I record data up to 6.4935e-05 seconds?   --- Quote End ---    According to the Terasic page for the DE0-nano, there is 32MB SDRAM. Assuming you can write to the SDRAM at the same rate as your ADC, you can store 32MB of data. If you ADC is 16-bits, then you can store 16M-samples. The total time that 16M-samples corresponds to depends on your sampling frequency.  The first thing you need to figure out is how fast can the SDRAM be written to on the DE0-nano. Check out the Terasic design examples, they should have one that uses the SDRAM.  Cheers, Dave

[Altera_Forum]

Thanks a lot Dave. 

 Great help.

[yashwanth24]

can we send the data from sdram / GPIO of cyclone IV  fpga to PC directly using USB blaster . Is this possible?