DRS4 Evaluation Board – Paul Scherrer Institut

Ever wanted to develop a Professional High Speed DAQ or a Storage Oscilloscope or even a High Speed Communications grade Logic Analyzer. Here is a front end Analog Mixed Chip with Eval Board.

You could make a High Speed Test Instrument and probably build a tablet computer front end. How would a 200 M Hz Oscilloscope look on you 10 inch tablet. You will float in the clouds. – delabs

The DRS chip is a full custom Integrated Circuit developed at PSI, Switzerland. It contains a switched capacitor array (SCA) with 1024 cells, capable of digitizing eight analog signals with high speed (6 GSPS) and high accuracy (11.5 bit SNR) on a single chip.

DRS4 Evaluation Board – Paul Scherrer Institut

By using channel cascading, we can configure this board with 2048 bins for each channel at the expense of a lower analog bandwidth of about 500 MHz. The on-board comparators enables the board to do a self-triggering on a programmed level of any of the input channels or logical combination of channels, much like an oscilloscope.

Highlights of Board with One DRS4 chip

• Four 50-Ohm terminated input channels with SMA connectors
• Active input buffers which result in an analog bandwidth of 700 MHz (-3dB).
• One AD9245 ADC to digitize signals from the DRS4 chip
• One Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA for readout control
• A 16-bit DAC to generate all on-board control voltages
• A serial EEPROM containing serial number and calibration information
• Internal trigger with user-defined thresholds on any of the four channes.