Challenges in Design of Very High-Speed Data Acquisition System for High-Altitude Application

This paper chronicles the design of a very high-speed data acquisition system (DAS) which is qualified with a novel architecture for high-altitude applications. The state-of-the-art system is realized with DDR SDRAM modules as the storage media and the controller are designed with AX2000 FPGAs from Microsemi. The design of this high-altitude system matches the reliability requirements using system-level methodologies. The main features of the data acquisition system are the capability to acquire and retrieve up to 12,000 pulses with variable real-time programmable pre-pulse and post-pulse data. The system has modular design approach. Some of the main design challenges are highlighted here.