A 100 gigabit measurement system with state of the art FPGA technology for characterization of high speed ADCs and DACs

Speeding up the data rate in today's fiber optical networks requires a sophisticated higher order modulation. For this purpose high speed ADCs and DACs are necessary with sampling rates above 25 GS/s and a resolution of 6 bit. This drives the combined data rate to 150 Gbit/s. To realize a cost-efficient and fully scalable measurement system for the characterization of the high speed ADCs and DACs, a FPGA board is used which is equipped with gigabit interfaces. These interfaces provide data rates between 6.5 Gbit/s and 11Gbit/s. In this paper we describe the hardware which is necessary to build up the measurement system and we describe the architecture of the FPGA logic which is implemented by means of VHDL.