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 HMCAD1511/HMCAD1520-based evaluation board: HMCAD1511-EBZ/HMCAD1520-EBZ

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

  3. Power supply for your carrier.

  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)

      • Micro-USB (UART)

      • 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. Signal Generator

  7. SMA male to BNC male cable

  8. External 1GHz clock source if working with the HMCAD1520-EBZ + extra SMA male to SMA male cable because the HMCAD1520-EBZ does not include an onboard crystal clock like the HMCAD1511-EBZ

  9. An SD card with at least 16GB of memory.

Software prerequisites

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

  1. Scopy v2.2 or later (must contain the ADC Plugin)

Note

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