Quite a bit of technology needs to surround and support new high speed A/D converters in order to deploy them successfully in realtime systems.

A complete signal acquisition plan must be developed. It should include frequency content of the signal, voltage levels, accuracy and bandwidth.

Processing extremely high-speed sample streams is often possible only with FPGA technology.

FPGAs can also help implement interfaces to the new serial switched fabrics so that data can be successfully delivered to other parts of the system.

We looked at several product examples and then at several critical applications that illustrate the impressive variety of tasks and systems made possible by this newly available technology.