I’m designing a project that requires simultaneous wide bandwidth capture across 4 receive channels. The cost of running 4x 120MS/s XTRX’s is dramatically less expensive then the USRP counterparts, hence my interest.
I will be providing external 10MHz and 1PPS reference signals that are to be shared among the 4 XTRX’s. (A distributor block may be required, though not my preference).
At full bandwidth, the USB 2.0 interface is out of the picture. So I plan on using the LimeFEA mPCIe Lite board rather that the Full since I have no need for the additional RF front end, and, as far I can tell, can still use the PPS and clock reference connectors on the XTRX (if there is any advantage clockwise from the Full carrier please let me know).
Due to size restrictions, I am constrained to use mini-itx motherboards which typically only have one pci-e 16x slot.
One approach to utilizing multiple XTRX’s is to use pci-e bifurcation, splitting the pci-e 16x into 4x4x4x4. However, such bifurcation adapter boards are difficult to find, and I have only seen a single one here with unknown quality: Amazon.com: JMT PCI-E 3.0 x16 1 to 4 Split Card Gen3 PCIe-Bifurcation x16 to x4x4x4x4 Expansion Card 20.2mm Spaced Slots SATA Power Supply Port : Electronics
I have also seen what looks most ideal, the XTRX PCIe Octopack which can be seen here: XTRX | Crowd Supply
Are there other solutions that the community here has used that work better for massive deployments?
Has the XTRX PCIe Octopack been discontinued?