STARSHIPRAIDER: Preparing for high-speed I/O characterization

In my previous post, I characterized the STARSHIPRAIDER I/O circuit for high voltage fault transient performance, but was unable to adequately characterize the high speed data performance because my DSO (Rigol DS1102D) only has 100 MHz of bandwidth.

Although I did have some ideas on how to improve the performance of the current I/O circuit, it was already faster than I could measure so I had no way to know if my improvements were actually making it any better. Ideally I'd just buy an oscilloscope with several GHz of bandwidth, but I'm not made of money and those scopes tend to be in the "request a quote" price range.

The obvious solution was to build one. I already had a proven high-speed sampling architecture from my TDR project so all I had to do was repackage it as an oscilloscope and make it faster still.

The circuit was beautifully simple: an output from the FPGA drives a 50 ohm trace to a SMA connector, then a second SMA connector drives the positive input of an ADCMP572 through a 3 dB attenuator (to keep my signal within range). The negative input is driven by a cheap 12-bit I2C DAC. The comparator output is then converted from CML to LVDS and fed to the host FPGA board. Finally, a 3.3V CML output from the FPGA drives the latch enable input on the comparator.

The "ADC" algorithm is essentially the same as on my TDR. I like to think of it as an equivalent-time version of a flash ADC: rather than 256 comparators digitizing the signal once, I digitize the signal 256 times with one comparator (and of course 256 different reference voltages). The post-processing to turn the comparator outputs into 8-bit ADC codes is the same.

Unlike the TDR, however, I also do equivalent-time sampling in the time domain. The FPGA generates the sampling and PRBS clocks with different PLL outputs (at 250 MHz / 4 ns period), and sweeps the relative phase in 100 ps steps to produce an effective resolution of 10 Gsps / 100 ps timebase.

Without further ado here's a picture of the board. Total BOM cost including connectors and PCB was approximately $50.

Oscilloscope board (yes, it's PMOD form factor!)

After some initial firmware development I was able to get some preliminary eye renders off the board. They were, to say the least, not ideal.

250 Mbps: very bumpy rise

500 Mbps: significant eye closure even with increased drive strength

I spent quite a while tracking down other bugs before dealing with the signal integrity issues. For example, a low-frequency pulse train showed up with a very uneven duty cycle:

Duty cycle distortion

Someone suggested that I try a slow rise time pulse to show the distortion more clearly. Not having a proper arbitrary waveform generator, I made do with a squarewave and R-C lowpass filter.

Ever seen breadboarded passives interfacing to edge-launch SMA connectors before?

It appeared that I had jump discontinuities in my waveform every two blocks (color coding)

I don't have an EE degree, but I can tell this looks wrong!

Interestingly enough, two blocks (of 32 samples each) were concatenated into a single JTAG transfer. These two were read in one clock cycle and looked fine, but the junction to the next transfer seemed to be skipping samples.

As it turned out, I had forgotten to clear a flag which led to me reading the waveform data before it was done capturing. Since the circular buffer was rotating in between packets, some samples never got sent.

The next bug required zooming into the waveform a bit to see. The samples captured on the first few (the number seemed to vary across bitstream builds) of my 40 clock phases were showing up shifted by 4 ns (one capture clock).

Horizontally offset samples

I traced this issue to a synchronizer between clock domains having variable latency depending on the phase offset of the source and destination clocks. This is an inherent issue in clock domain crossing, so I think I'm just going to have to calibrate it out somehow. For the short term I'm manually measuring the number of offset phases each time I recompile the FPGA image, and then correcting the data in post-processing.

The final issue was a hardware bug. I was terminating the incoming signal with a 50Ω resistor to ground. Although this had good AC performance, at DC the current drawn from a high-level input was quite significant (66 mA at 3.3V). Since my I/O pins can't drive this much, the line was dragged down.

I decided to rework the input termination to replace the 50Ω terminator with split 100Ω resistors to 3.3V and ground. This should have about half the DC current draw, and is Thevenin equivalent to a 50Ω terminator to 1.65V. As a bonus, the mid-level termination will also allow me to AC-couple the incoming signal if that becomes necessary.

Mill out trace from ground via to on-die 50Ω termination resistor

Remove soldermask from ground via and signal trace

Add 100Ω 0402 low-side terminator

Add 100Ω 0402 high-side terminator, plus jumper trace to 3.3V bulk decoupling cap

Add 10 nF high speed decoupling cap to help compensate for inductance of long feeder trace

I cleaned off all of the flux residue and ran a second set of eye loopback tests at 250 and 500 Mbps. The results were dramatically improved:

Post-rework at 250 Mbps

Post-rework at 500 Mbps

While not perfect, the new eye openings are a lot cleaner. I hope to tweak my input stage further to reduce probing artifacts, but for the time being I think I have sufficient performance to compare multiple STARSHIPRAIDER test circuits and see how they stack up at relatively high speeds.

Next step: collect some baseline data for the current STARSHIPRAIDER characterization board, then use that to inform my v0.2 I/O circuit!