The Design of A Software Defined Arbitrary Waveform Generator

The Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG) is an important instrument that is widely used in automatic test equipment, radar system, and other fields for generating complex signals. The increasing demand for waveform's complexity is consisted of repeatable segments and advanced-segments, where each segment or segments group could be repeated multiple times. Those requirements make the existing design, implemented by an address generator, complex. The software defined technology can separate the instruction sequence processing from the Data plane to the Controller where the complex logic is defined by software, which lead to a simplified data plane. This paper proposes a design that will generate complex arbitrary waveform by decoupling the waveform composing logic in address generator out from the data plane as an instruction controller. The controller support instruction sequence defined by segment and a jump instruction, which can implement the repeatable segments and the advanced-segments, respectively. We built an AWG based on this design and made the implementation in a field programmable gate array with a required clock frequency of 125 MHz. The design has a high sampling rate of 4 gigabit samples per second and can generate complex arbitrary waveform consisting of repeatable segments and advanced-segments.