
RFSoC Data Converter Evaluation Tool User Guide
5
UG1287 (v2018.2) October 1, 2018
Chapter 1
Introduction
Overview
The objective of this reference design is to help you quickly and easily evaluate the new RF
Data Converter (DC) Evaluation Tool functionality in the Zynq® Ult™ family of
RFSoCs. The RFSoC design demonstrates the capabilities and performance of the RF data
converter (RFDC—RF-ADC and RF-DAC) available in the RFSoC devices. The evaluation tool
serves as a platform for you to evaluate the Zynq Ult RFSoC features and helps
accelerate the product design cycle.
The evaluation tool consists of a ZCU111 evaluation board and a custom-developed
graphical user interface (GUI) installed on a Windows host machine. The evaluation tool
allows you to configure the operation of the RF-ADCs and RF-DACs and perform some basic
tests e.g., FFT analysis of the ADC output for various input test signals. The key
differentiator of Zynq Ult RFSoC devices when compared to many other discrete
solutions is that the device contains both RF-ADCs and RF-DACs. However, one significant
benefit is the DACs can be used to provide test signals for the ADC (i.e., loopback) which
facilitates a very compact and easy to use solution for early demonstration or evaluation.
All communications to the host PC (GUI) use the processing system (PS) Ethernet interface.
This is necessary to facilitate the transfer of a large amount of test data as efficiently as
possible. The ZCU111 evaluation board supports an external DDR4 memory interface on the
programmable logic (PL) in addition to the PS DDR4 memory. Waveforms with a limited
number of samples can leverage on-chip memory, but application testing and prototyping
require the use of much larger external memories.
The Xilinx® Vivado® IP integrator flow is used to create the hardware design, which is
partitioned between the PS, RFDC, and PL. The reference design uses the IP integrator core
for the RF Data Converter subsystem. The implementation supports all data rates on PL to
the Data Converter interface, all converter sample rates and digital up conversion
(DUC)/digital down conversion (DDC) configurations with a single design. The Xilinx
PetaLinux flow is used to create and integrate the software components, including the Linux
kernel and drivers.