Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] ADRV9008-2, Zynq FPGA boards, and gnuradio

[Erik Heinz]

Hi Marcus,

thank you for clarifying. I already guessed that signal processing in the FPGA 
is required, but I had the hope that we can start with a CPU-only setup with 
limited performance and improve it by FPGA implementations later on.

Do you have a rough guess what bandwidth a Cortex-A53 ARM on an ZCU102 board 
would be able to handle, considered some basic data processing within gnuradio?

This approach, however, would only work if there were some support and some 
hooks within the Linux IIO kernel driver and/or libiio for including customer 
FPGA designs. So far I have not found any hint that such support exists. In 
this case running  gnuradio on the Zync board would be a dead end solution that 
cannot be accelerated easily, and no appropriate approach for the given task.

Best regards,
Erik

________________________________________
Von: Müller, Marcus (CEL) <address@hidden>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 25. Juni 2019 13:05
An: address@hidden; Erik Heinz
Betreff: Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] ADRV9008-2, Zynq FPGA boards, and gnuradio

Hi Erik,

so, GNU Radio *itself* is purely host-based software; in other words,
you'd be processing 100s of MHz on the poor Zynq's ARM (will not even
remotely happen).

What you'd need is to do the signal processing in the FPGA, for the
most significant part. After you've selected your channel and reduced
your sampling rate to that, yes, GNU Radio could very well deal with
that data (if the ARM CPU is up for that).

There's an accelerator framework, that Ettus developed for their Zynq-
based products, called RFNoC. That works relatively nicely with GNU
Radio. Pretty sure Analog Devices themselves also have libiio-
compatible ways of signal (pre)processing on Zynqs, but I'm not
knowledgeable about that at all.

Which FPGA would fit your bill depends on the kind of signal processing
you'd need to do. I'd assume the 7000 series Zynq would be a bit on the
limits of its bandwidths dealing with 450 MS/s.

Best regards,
Marcus

On Tue, 2019-06-25 at 10:04 +0000, Erik Heinz wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> we are developing an application where a large bandwidth (some 100 MHz at  
> 5–6 GHz mid frequency) needs to be processed to extract a small bandwidth
> payload signal.
>
> For rapid prototyping and testing algorithms I am thinking about using an 
> ADRV9008-2 evaluation board, a Xilinx Zynq FPGA board, and gnuradio.
>
> I understand that there do exist ready-made Linux distributions that run on 
> boards like the ZC702 (Zynq-7000 based) or ZCU102 (Ultrascale+ based) and it 
> is possible to run gnuradio on top of it.
> I also found some hint that there does exist software to access an 
> EVAL-ADRV9008 board connected to the Zync board from within gnuradio.
> So I assume in principle it should be possible to process the 450 MHz 
> bandwidth from the ADRV9008-2 directly on the Zync board using gnuradio in 
> real time.
>
> Can anyone confirm that this assumption is correct and that such a setup 
> could work? Has this be done before?
> Would both the ZC702 and the ZCU102 be suitable?
> Where should I start reading?
>
> Lots of questions. Thank you for some answers.
> Erik
>
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