Hardware Design of a Highly Integrated RFSoC-Based Platform for Wideband Spectrum Sensing

This paper presents the system-level hardware design of a highly integrated, single-board software-defined radio (SDR) platform built around the Xilinx XCZU27DR Radio Frequency System-on-Chip (RFSoC). The platform integrates gigasample-per-second (Gsps) data converters, FPGA programmable logic, multi-core ARM processors, 2 GB of DDR4 memory, and diverse high-speed peripheral interfaces onto a single board measuring 150 mm by 100 mm.

Key design strategies are detailed, including a hierarchical power supply scheme that employs DC-DC converters for digital circuits and low-dropout regulators (LDOs) for noise-sensitive analog circuits; a low-jitter clock synthesis module based on the LMK04832 that preserves ADC dynamic performance at Gsps sampling rates; and an RF front-end that uses a balun transformer for impedance matching and single-ended-to-differential conversion at the integrated RF-ADC input.