Prerequisites

What you need, depends on what you are trying to do. As a minimum, you need to start out with:

Hardware prerequisites

  1. The AD916X-based evaluation board: EVAL-AD916X-FMCZ

  2. A supported FPGA carrier platform, currently ZCU102 on HPC0

  3. An FPGA carrier platform. Our recommended ones can be found here.

    • There are a few more boards, which do work, but are currently not supported by us. The experience with the fabric-only solutions is very close to the ARM/FPGA SoC based solutions, but the GUI runs on a host PC (Windows or Linux).

  4. Some way to interact with the FPGA platform:

    1. for the ARM/FPGA SoC platforms, this normally includes:

      • HDMI or DisplayPort monitor

      • USB Keyboard

      • USB Mouse

    2. for the FPGA only solutions, this includes:

      • LAN cable (Ethernet)

      • Host PC (Windows or Linux)

  5. Internet connection (without proxies makes things much easier) to update the scripts/binaries on the SD card that came with the ADI FMC Card (firewalls are OK, proxies make things a pain).

  6. RF Test Equipment:

    • RF spectrum analyzer or signal analyzer (to measure and visualize the DAC output spectrum and performance)

    • SMA cables

  7. An SD card with at least 16GB of memory (in case you’re using Linux). You should have received one when purchasing the evaluation board.

Software prerequisites

Note

Pre-built files for this reference design are not yet available. The files must be built manually using the links below. Official release artifacts will be provided here once available. For now, check:

You can also check the available Linux driver Linux at AD9162 IIO driver and the HDL repository at EVAL-AD916X HDL.

The following files must be gathered into a single working directory before programming the board:

  • HDL boot image: BOOT.BIN

  • Linux Kernel image: uImage

  • Linux device tree: devicetree.dtb

    • Built from available dts files for AD916x in the Linux kernel source tree:

    • EVAL-AD916X HDL (check readme for details)

Normally, for basic functionalities regarding visualizing the data received from the FPGA, we use the following:

  1. IIO Oscilloscope, a graphical tool for capturing and visualizing IIO device data

  2. Scopy v2.0 or later (must contain the IIO plugin)

  3. UART terminal application (PuTTY/TeraTerm/Minicom), 115200 8N1

Note

ADI does not offer FPGA carrier platforms for sale or loan; getting one yourself is the normal part of development or evaluation.