Building High-Speed Data Acquisition Cards with FPGA: Why FMC HPC + PCIe x8 Is the Golden Combination
Oscilloscopes, digitizers, phased-array radars, software-defined radios and high-speed vibration monitoring — the core of all these systems is "high-speed ADC sampling → data packing → transfer to the host for processing." Why must this step use an FPGA rather than an MCU, a DSP or a CPU sampling directly? Why have the FMC HPC connector and the PCIe x8 interface become the golden combination for high-speed acquisition cards? This article starts from a real 250MSPS acquisition project.