White Paper

WHITE PAPER Strategies for Deploying Xilinx's Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC mrcy.com 9 applications. Mercury's Quartz products address some of the most common requirements of RFSoC targeted applications with new built-in IP ready to use with no additional IP design needed. These include an enhanced acquisition engine that supports the full bandwidth 4 GHz sample rate with options to snapshot data to on-board memory or to stream over dual 100 GigE interfaces, an optimized x16 decimator for data reduction in high channel count applications, and an enhanced waveform generator engine for outputting D/A data supplied by the 100 GigE interface or from waveforms loaded to on-board memory. In each case the installed functions can provide a final solution or be the basis of a custom solution when built upon using the Navigator™ FPGA Design Kit (FDK). The Navigator FDK provides a library of all of Mercury's IP functions as blocks that can be used in Xilinx's Vivado IP Integrator, giving the IP designer immediate access to the product's entire FPGA design as a block diagram. Individual IP blocks can be removed, modified, or replaced with custom IP to meet the application's processing requirements. If at any time a designer needs to work with the VHDL source code directly, it is always accessible in a source window, as well as full on-line documentation of every Mercury IP core. Navigator FDK leverages the features of Vivado allowing an engineer to start designing with the FDK immediately without the need to learn new software tools and streamlines the path to a final application solution by providing the foundation for custom IP to be built on. The companion product to the Navigator FDK is the Navigator Board Support Package (BSP). With every creation of, or modification to an IP block, a change to software, most likely running on the RFSoC's ARM processors, to control the new or modified IP might be needed. The Navigator BSP was designed to help manage this relationship between IP and software. The BSP provides C language functions and utilities structured to map the IP blocks provided in the FDK. This one-to-one relationship between IP and the software to control it is another path to manage the increasing complexity of applications. RFSoC brings new possibilities for addressing some of the most challenging requirements of high bandwidth, high channel count systems. Understanding how this new technology can specifically address SWaP-C and low latency applications is key to matching it to many applications that can benefit from it the most. And while Xilinx has provided a rich set of tools, IP and support at the chip level, equipment manufactures like Mercury, using RFSoC at the center of their board architecture, can leverage the power of RFSoC by providing unique solutions to streamline the path from RFSoC to a deployed system solution. Figure 10 Navigator 's one-to-one relationship between BSP modules and IP modules simplifies the task of keeping software changes synchronized with IP changes. A/D Control BSP Module Clock Control BSP Module Sync Bus Interface BSP Module Digital Downconverter BSP Module Power Meter BSP Module Timestamp Generator BSP Module IQ Data Format BSP Module A/D Control IP Module Clock Control IP Module Sync Bus Interface IP Module Digital Downconverter IP Module Power Meter IP Module Timestamp Generator IP Module IQ Data Format IP Module NAVIGATOR: BOARD SUPPORT PACKAGE NAVIGATOR: FPGA DESIGN KIT

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