During the Parallella Technical Conference in Tokyo we announced a new Software Defined Radio platform, created by “friends of Parallella”. The platform is based on a popular Analog Devices RFIC called AD9361. The chip has some pretty impressive specifications:

• RF 2 × 2 transceiver with integrated 12-bit DACs and ADCs
• Band: 70 MHz to 6.0 GHz
• Supports TDD and FDD operation
• Tunable channel BW: <200 kHz to  56 MHz
• Dual receivers: 6 differential or 12 single-ended inputs
• Receiver sensitivity noise figure < 2.5 dB
• Independent automatic gain control
• General availability

Analog Devices has done an outstanding job creating open high quality reference designs and evaluation boards for the AD9361. Lucky for us a lot of those reference designs are based on the Zynq!  The picture below shows the FMCOMMSevaluation board for the chip. The digital connector on the board is an FPGA Mezzanine Connector (FMC).  In order to interface  the ADI FMC board to the Parallella Samtec connectors, our friends designed an FMC to Samtec adapter board.

The new platform has been validated by running  GNU Radio applications.

The new FMCOMMS adapter board is now in the production process and we are working on getting these on the shelves as soon as possible. We will be sending out a second announcement when the boards are ready to be purchased at distributors. So that we can gauge how many boards to build, please do leave a note in the comments below or send an email to “support@adapteva.com”