How to quickly evaluate data converters ？

ADI provides the means to easily evaluate every new product release, its achievable performance, as its features. Firstly, our evaluation boards consist of a printed circuit board (PCB) that houses the main devices—for example, an ADC—along with the required companion products such as voltage reference, driver amplifier, clock source, power solution, etc. Secondly, these boards come with software that showcases the actual performance the solution can achieve. It displays real data that can be acquired with this platform. For the past couple of years, ACE software[1] has been the platform used for this purpose.

Within the ACE platform, each product features a plug-in that eases the device configuration by accessing the device register map through clean, easily navigable GUI.

Following the ADC example, ACE normally displays the raw data in the form of a waveform or histogram and calculates AC performance metrics like SNR or THD through FFTs. This article shows how to automate all these procedures without the need for software development.

Figure 1. A block diagram of an evaluation board’s hardware and software interaction, including ACE to Python/MATLAB communication.

ACE Plug-Ins

Figure 2 shows the AD7380 plug-in chip view where several buttons are offered to easily configure the device:

  1. REF allows for the selection of either the internal or external reference
  2. OSC can enable oversampling and set the oversampling ratio

Figure 2. The AD7380’s ACE plug-in chip view.

Figure 3 shows the AD7606C-16 plug-in chip view where several buttons, highlighted with darker blue color, can be used among others to:

  1. Select the analog input range, per channel, by clicking the PGA symbol
  2. Select the reference source, whether internal or external
  3. Select the oversampling ratio
  4. Configure the offset/gain/phase calibration features
  5. Configure the diagnostics

Figure 3. The AD7606C-16’s ACE plug-in chip view.

While the previous examples use the AD7380 and AD7606C-16, the scope of this article is not just these products, but everything related to working with ACE and automating repetitive tasks. Every ACE plug-in will have its own GUI layout. However, as the products grow in complexity and more features are added (for example, diagnostics, calibrations, etc.), the more complex and tedious it becomes to test all these features manually. ACE remote control offers the ability to set or sweep parameters to, for example, sweep the oversampling ratio and measure how the noise performance improves.

Setting Up ACE Remote Control

Before starting to create code to control ACE remotely, the communication with ACE needs to be established by following these steps:

  1. Open ACE and go to Settings
  2. Go to the IPC Server tab and ensure it is enabled
  3. Make sure a port is allocated, preferably 2357

Figure 4. Setting up communication with ACE.

Recording a Macro and Generating Scripts

ACE has a Macro Tools menu to record configuration and device interaction steps by putting them into a macro file. Once a macro is generated, it can then be used to automatically repeat all the steps at once. The following steps explain how to generate a macro:

  1. Open ACE then go to Tools >> Macro Tools.
  2. Hit the record macro commands button, on the right-hand side of the icon within the blue area highlighted in Figure
  3. Start performing device interaction such as changing parameters, inputting values to registers on the memory map, capturing data, etc. The Command window will fill up as the GUI is navigated and interacted with.
  4. Once all actions/settings to be entered are recorded, hit the stop recording macro commands Same location as above. The Command window will automatically pop up then.

As an example, while recording the macro, the user configures the oversampling ratio and the resolution mode, just by using the buttons explained in Figure 2. The Command window will look like Figure 5.

Figure 5. Command window and macro tools.

In this window, all the steps recorded can be reviewed and even skip/break any unwanted autogenerated step, before exporting the whole program into a selectable language script, as highlighted in red in Figure 5.

Once a macro file has been recorded, it can then be saved and played again to repeat the previously performed steps. ACE has a built-in feature to generate scripts that perform the recorded actions in a supported language of choice. So, following the previous list, the next steps will be:

  1. Click on the Generate icon, at the right-hand side of the blue area highlighted in Figure 5, to open the script generator window.
  2. Select the desired language among C#, MATLAB, or Python, and hit Export.

 

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