Our friends at Xilinx recently blogged about how the BBC R+D department replaced a 32-year old small rack-mount audio codec with low-cost off-the-shelf solutions customized to fit the BBC’s needs. According to Justin Mitchell, principal engineer at BBC R+D, this project occurred since the original audio codec could no longer be supported due to component aging and a lack of parts.
The heart of the new system is the Xilinx Zynq SoC found on the low-cost ZedBoard development kit available from Avnet. Aside from the computing and processing power that the Zynq SoC provides, the BBC R+D department leveraged the I/O expansion on ZedBoard provided via Samtec’s LPC FMC connector.
If you look at the picture of the ZedBoard, you can see the LPC FMC connector on the right side of the board.
Additionally, the BBC R+D department developed a customized I/O expansion board that emulated the performance of the previously installed hardware. This design approach simplified the overall system while reducing the overall footprint of the audio codec.
While the original purpose of FMC was to define a compact electro-mechanical expansion interface FPGA baseboard daughter cards, this BBC R+D project shows the flexibility of application that Samtec’s FMC interconnect can support.
Please visit the FMC Standard Connectors webpage for more information on Samtec and partner FMC-based solutions.
