Any D/A converter and amplifier for microwave frequencies?

[Ulysees]

Can anyone guess what the highly specific application is for the Maxim part?

Also they don't say much about the evaluation board that comes with it, no mention of memory or anything. How is it likely to be driven from a pc?

 

[chroot]

I'm going to assume it's intended for military use, probably in a multi-band software radio. They make it pretty clear that it's intended for direct IF use in communications.

There's essentially no chance that it's meant to be driven by a PC -- not directly anyway. You do realize, I hope, that there's no way at all to actually get 2.3 billion 12-bit samples (almost 3.5 gigabytes of data per second) out of a PC. Normal PCs have only a fraction of the aggregate bus bandwidth necessary for moving this kind of data around, much less the external drivers and so on necessary to get it out onto a wire.

If I had to guess, I'd assume they have a programmable high-end FPGA on the demo board, which you probably CAN load with pattern data from a PC, but not in real-time. It's also highly probable that the board only provides a high-speed connector that allows you to connect it to a high-end pattern generator.

- Warren

 

[Ulysees]

> there's no way at all to actually get 2.3 billion 12-bit samples (almost 3.5 gigabytes of data per second) out of a PC.

Decent graphics cards from as far back as... 2006 came with PCI-express 16x which is up to 4 Gbytes/s. Here's one:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/7_series_techspecs.html
http://www.hothardware.com/articles/NVIDIA_GeForce_Go_7950_GTX_Preview1/?page=2

Do I win anything? :)

 

[chroot]

Just because one link in the chain can deliver 4 GB/s does not mean every link in the chain can. Good luck to you.

- Warren