Edgetech 3200-XS, User Manual

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Tiger Board Description
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1.5 Tiger Board Description
The Sonar Interface board (Tiger board) is the real-time controller for sonar processing. It
includes transmit waveform tables and multiple channels of 10-bit high speed
digital-to-analog (D/A) converters, support for external and internal triggers, and support for
multiple sonar analog-to-digital (A/D) converters. It was designed to support a combined
sonar system (with both sub-bottom as well as multi-frequency side-scan capability), or to
be used single channel as a basic sub-bottom controller. At periodic intervals it generates
the transmit waveform(s), and it continuously buffers ADC data.
The Tiger board represents a new generation of re-engineered and optimized sonar
electronics. It is designed to address a broad spectrum of sonar applications from a
common and well tested base of components. Among the features of this generation are
lower power consumption, higher speeds, smaller form factors, and high analog
sensitivity-to-minimum noise electronics for improved operating ranges. The Tiger board is
actually composed of a set of three board as shown in Figure 1-5: a Carrier board, an
Acquisition board and a Sonar/IDE board. All three boards are connected electrically and
mechanically as a single assembly that plugs into the Mother board PCI slot.
1.5.1 Carrier Board
This board has the same physical size as an industry standard full slot PCI card. There are
two BNC connectors, TRIGGER IN and TRIGGER OUT, and female connectors on either
side for mating with the other two boards in the board set. An onboard DC/DC converter
pr12 VDC to the preamplifier in the tow vehicle.
1.5.2 Acquisition Board
The Acquisition board contains band pass filtering and up to eight 24-bit A/D converters,
where only two channels are used. The first channel is for the received acoustic data from
the preamplifier, and the second channel is used for power-up diagnostics.
1.5.3 Sonar/IDE Board
The sonar/IDE board is composed of two RAM memories, an acquisition memory and a
chirp memory, and six 10-bit D/A converters for generating transmit waveforms. The
transmit ping rate and sampling clock are generated from this board. The IDE portion of the
board provides the interfacing circuitry required to communicate between the Mother board
and the Tiger board.