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- Building a DSP board, Part Two: Choosing the ADCs and DACs
- ----------------------------------------------------------
-
- This is the second in a series on how I went about building
- a dual Motorola DSP56000 sampling board.
-
- Choosing the DACs and ADCs turned out to be the most difficult choice
- I had to make. There are two major types: serial and parallel.
-
- At first, I thought I would use the 8bit parallel port on the 56000 to
- read in the LSB and MSB from each ADC. This would require some tricky
- external logic and buffering, however.
-
- After looking through the schematics to my Denon 1500 CD player and seeing
- that they used Burr-Brown DACs, I decided to give them a try. Another
- big factor in this decision was that I could also get sample/holds,
- op-amps, and ADCs from them. The biggest factor was that when I called
- them up, they said, "How many do you need? We'll give them to you for
- free." How could I turn that up?
-
- I talked to a rep from Burr-Brown and found him to be extremely helpful.
- He suggested that I do double oversampling and use serial chips. Why?
- Here's the advantage:
- +---+
- 2xL-Ch-->| |
- | |-----> Alternating 1xL-Ch, 1xR-Ch
- 2xR-Ch-->| |
- +---+
- SM5805
-
- 2xL-Ch is the left channel sampled at 88kHz. 1xL-Ch is the left
- channel decimated by two down to 44kHz.
-
- The SM5805 is a killer digital filter that bandlimits the data to
- 22kHz, then decimates the data down to 44kHz. There are two input
- channels of 88kHz and one output channel of 88kHz (two 44kHz channels).
-
- Now I thought, "Gee, the alternating L/R channel output sure looks
- familiar, doesn't it?" Sure enough, I found an application note
- for the 56000 for a digital equalizer. It used the bitstream right
- out of a CD player, which alternates the left and right channels.
-
- The 56000 has a synchronous serial port built in. It can be configured
- to use an external bit rate clock and a word clock. Words can be
- 8, 12, 16, or 24 bits long.
-
- Now, another nice feature of the SM5805 (it's from Nippon Precision
- Circuits, BTW) is that it will provide ALL of the signals I need
- for sampling and reconstruction. It will drive the S/H (sample/hold)
- , ADC, DAC, and supply the bit rate and word rate clocks for the
- 56000. In other words, it's just plain awesome!
-
- The best part of doing double oversampling is that you don't have to
- build a severe sampling or reconstruction filter. The SM5805 supplies
- a really sharp low pass (90dB in 4kHz!), so you can build a gentle
- slope analog filter and spread your 90dB cut from 20kHz to 60kHz.
-
- But wait, now how much would you pay? The SM5805 *also* does
- upsampling from the alternating L/R channel to 2x L & R channel
- (basically reverse the block diagram above).
-
- Here is a block diagram of what I have so far:
-
- analog analog
- signal----->filter----->S/H----->ADC----->SM5805------>56000
- L-Ch (LP) ^
- |
- analog analog |
- signal----->filter----->S/H----->ADC--------+
- R-Ch (LP)
-
- The true beauty of this design is that for the output, you simply
- reverse all of the arrows and replace the ADC with a DAC.
-
- analog analog
- signal<-----filter<-----S/H<-----DAC<-----SM5805<------56000
- L-Ch (LP) |
- |
- analog analog |
- signal<-----filter<-----S/H<-----DAC<-------+
- R-Ch (LP)
-
- We use the same S/H and analog filters as before. We simply configure
- the SM5805 differently.
-
- Okay, what chips did I use? For the DAC, I used the PCM56; for the
- ADC, I used the PCM78; for the S/H, I used the SHC5320. All of these
- chips had the ability to do double oversampling. There are probably
- better chips out now, as I chose these about two years ago.
-
- BTW, my Denon player uses the SM5801, which is the one channel,
- parallel version of the SM5805. Also, it uses the PCM54, which
- is the parallel version of the PCM56.
-
- Next: designing the analog filter.
-
-