Hello,
First time poster; please be kind. I am fairly new to FPGA and am embarking on a reasonably long-term projec. Ideally the more plug and pay the better, however, I am somewhat overwhelmed with the breadth of options, and was looking for advice.
It is an optics project which gives me the following limitations:
- I have one laser which has a set repetition rate for which I have no clock reference (other than the pulsed light that it produces at 80 MHz), this is the main clock for the experiment.
- I also need to use 1 or 2 pieces of equipment that requires a 10 MHz reference.
- I will have inputs (to the FPGA) from a number of detectors (4 or 5) each of which will be an SMA connection, which will be an input to an LUT evaluated at 80 MHz
- The output of this LUT will then trigger a scope based on its output (another SMA connection).
My only FPGA experience so far has been via a course in which we were taught to work in Verilog in Vivado using Xilinx; so I would like to stick to that.
At first glance it seems that the XEM6310MT via BRK6310MT breakout board is the only plug and play solution that would suit my input/output needs due to the high number of SMAs I’d like to use; however I need to be sure I can clock at ~80 MHz of the laser, and use the clocking wizard to produce my 10 MHz ref from there.
I was wondering if I could lean on your experience and ask you to sanity check this solution, in particular:
- Am I right in thinking I can alternatively clock the device with my 80 MHz input (generated from a detector on the laser output) using the expansion inputs and then feed the 80 MHz into the Clock wizard to generate my 10 MHz out of one of the SMAs?
- Is there anything that stands out to you as a red flag , or a problem that I am likely to run into?
Any advice / pointers that you could give would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,