[TangerineSDR] A few thoughts after Monday night telecon

[Jonathan]

Hi Franco,

I wanted to thank you for your input and involvement on this project! I
wanted to propose the dual controller solution since the ADC has a two
channel output, each data lane would be connected to each FX3. This would
maintain more compatibility because you can use USB 3.0 and won't have to
utilize USB 3.1 or greater speeds. With this, you can use lesser USB 3.0
SBCs and if you want more processing, connect another server or system to
that multicast group. This configuration would be great for amateur pulsar
astronomy too if the frontend was modified for higher frequency bands,
again, maintaining more compatibility with USB 3.0.

Clocking would come from the GPSDO, of course.

Can the FX3 accept both data lanes if you wanted to run the ADC and lower
sampling rates and data lengths?

Jonathan
KC3EEY

On Thu, Jun 8, 2023 at 12:28 AM Dr. Nathaniel A. Frissell Ph.D. via
TangerineSDR <tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org> wrote:

> Hi Franco,
>
>
>
> Thank you so much for joining us and for your comments and contributions.
> They are much appreciated.
>
>
>
> Dave Witten, Majid Mokhtari, and Tom McDermott are starting to discuss and
> plan the new USB-based interface board. I know they also appreciate your
> comments.
>
>
>
> Talk to you more soon and 73,
>
> Nathaniel W2NAF
>
>
>
> *From:* TangerineSDR <tangerinesdr-bounces at lists.tapr.org> *On Behalf Of *Franco
> VENTURI via TangerineSDR
> *Sent:* Wednesday, June 7, 2023 11:34 PM
> *To:* tangerinesdr at lists.tapr.org
> *Cc:* Franco VENTURI <fventuri at comcast.net>
> *Subject:* [TangerineSDR] A few thoughts after Monday night telecon
>
>
>
> First of all, thanks for the very interesting telecon last Monday night; I
> apologize I had to drop at around 10:30pm, but it was getting late here.
>
>
>
> With this message to the list I want to try to put on 'paper' some of the
> points of Monday discussion (plus a few other things I found out after
> that) to help moving forward. Please feel free to comment and add your
> thoughts (and correct my errors and omissions, of course).
>
>
>
> - the basic plan would be to have the ADC (AD9648) in the Tangerine SDR RF
> board somehow send the 'raw' stream of samples to the computer at 'full'
> speed; all the DSP processing would occur in the computer; a good approach
> for this would be Phil Karn's KA9Q ka9q-radio program running on the
> computer (fast convolution filter bank)
>
> - by 'full' speed we mean dual 16bit streams at 122.88MHz; the 16bit
> number comes from 14 bit from the ADC + 1bit for overflow + 1 bit to mark
> the PPS sample (if I understand correctly how Tom does it); doing some
> quick math this means being able to transfer to the computer about
> 3.932Gb/s
>
> - the USB 3.0 controller used by the RX888, Cypress/Infineon FX3, is
> capable of streaming about 32bit @100MHz, i.e. 3.2Gb/s
>
> - to reach the transfer rate of almost 4Gb/s there are two approaches:
> scale horizontally (i.e. two FX3 controllers) as suggested by Rob Robinett,
> or scale vertically (USB 3.1 gen 2, USB 3.2 gen 2, or USB 4); these can
> offer another USB mode called SuperSpeed Plus with a signaling rate of
> 10GHz, i.e. probably capable of transfer rates of the order of 8Gb/s. These
> last couple of days I searched on the Internet, and I couldn't find a
> 10Gbps USB peripheral controller that could be used in a way similar to the
> FX3. Monday night I thought Cypress/Infineon CCG6SF and CCG6DF could do it,
> but looking at this document (
> https://new-origin.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-EZ-PD_CCG6DF_CCG6SF_USB_Type-C_Port_Controller-DataSheet-v11_00-EN.pdf?fileId=8ac78c8c7d0d8da4017d0ee8e2c571be),
> there is no mention of 10Gbps
>
> - someone mentioned that it wouldn't be too hard to modify the design of
> the data engine board to use one or two FX3's instead of the FPGA, and I
> would be very interested to understand better this option
>
> - also I think that someone mentioned that the FPGA could still be used to
> do some preprocessing of the data and reduce the amount of data that would
> need to be transferred via the USB 3 connection; perhaps sending the sum
> and the difference of the two streams could reduce the bandwidth required,
> since the difference would probably require less bits to be sent, similar
> to how the FM stereo signal is broadcast
>
> - another option to achieve that kind of transfer rate would be via PCIe,
> but in this case I think the data engine board would have to be a PCIe
> board, and that might make the design more complicated, not sure.
>
>
>
> I think this is all; I just wanted to start a conversation and I am
> looking forward to hearing your ideas.
>
>
>
> 73,
>
> Franco Venturi K4VZ
> --
> TangerineSDR mailing list
> TangerineSDR at lists.tapr.org
> http://lists.tapr.org/mailman/listinfo/tangerinesdr_lists.tapr.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.tapr.org/pipermail/tangerinesdr_lists.tapr.org/attachments/20230608/9c038b9b/attachment.html>