There's a reason why building a high-performance, portable SDR system has always been painful.
The moment you need multi-channel, wideband RF capability, your design balloons — discrete ADCs, DACs, JESD204 interfaces, external clocking chains, power-hungry FPGAs stitched together across a sprawling PCB. What should be elegant becomes a BOM nightmare. And "portable"? Forget it.
That's exactly the problem we set out to solve.
After an extended period of development, rigorous RF validation, and meticulous power optimisation, our engineering team at Avnet has completed the ANZLPRFSOM65DR — a production-ready, general-purpose System-on-Module built on AMD's Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC DFE (XCZU65DR) — the industry's only single-chip adaptable radio platform.
Why this matters
The XCZU65DR sits at the top of AMD's RFSoC family. It is not a Gen 1, Gen 2, or Gen 3 device — it belongs to the DFE class, AMD's most advanced RFSoC tier, delivering the highest RF input frequency in the family at 7.125 GHz with the most flexible digital front-end processing available on a single chip.
By monolithically integrating direct RF-sampling data converters onto an adaptive SoC, the RFSoC architecture eliminates the need for external data converters entirely — enabling up to 50% reduced power and footprint compared to multi-component discrete solutions, and removing the power-hungry JESD204 interfaces that traditionally sit between FPGAs and analog.
We took that already-powerful silicon and packaged it into a compact, deployment-ready SOM — with everything an RF system builder needs to get from concept to prototype, fast.
What's inside
RF subsystem — no external converters needed:
- 6× 14-bit RF-ADC channels sampling at 5.9 GS/s
- 6× 14-bit RF-DAC channels running at 9.85 GS/s
- Direct RF input up to 7.125 GHz — covering L-Band, S-Band, C-Band, and beyond
- Programmable DDCs and DUCs with decimation/interpolation from 1× to 40×
Precision clocking — engineered for clean RF:
- Skyworks Si5381 ultra-low phase noise wireless jitter attenuator — 72 fs typical RMS jitter (12 kHz–20 MHz), based on 4th-generation DSPLL technology
- SiTime SiT5358 precision MEMS Super-TCXO — ±50 ppb stability, resilient against airflow, vibration, shock, and EMI, leveraging DualMEMS™ and TurboCompensation™ technology
Processing — heterogeneous compute for real-time RF:
- Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 (up to 1.33 GHz) for Linux and application processing
- Dual-core Arm Cortex-R5F (up to 533 MHz) for real-time, deterministic control
- 4GB DDR4-2400 | 64GB eMMC | 2× 2Gb QSPI
Low power — designed for handheld and portable systems:
- < 1W in low-power mode — measured at 12V input with all peripherals in sleep, DDR4 in self-refresh, and RF disabled. The R5F core remains alive for wake-on-event and system monitoring
- Compact 9 × 13 cm SOM form factor
- This is not a lab-only evaluation board — it's a module designed to go into real portable products.
System integration:
- 8× GTY high-speed transceivers + 4× PS-GTR lanes
- GbE, USB 2.0
- SEAM board-to-board connector to carrier board, with RF signals routed to SMA
- Reference carrier board and evaluation kit available
Who should care about this
If you're building any of the following, this module was designed for you:
- Software-defined radio platforms — multi-channel TX/RX on a single module
- Portable spectrum monitoring and analysis tools — sub-1W standby makes handheld viable
- Embedded RF sensing and signal acquisition nodes — compact, low-power, field-deployable
- Test and measurement equipment — rapid prototyping with integrated RF
- Multi-channel RF receiver / transmitter systems — 6T6R out of the box
Built to last
AMD's UltraScale+ adaptive SoCs are supported through 2045, with typical product lifespans extending well past 15 years. When you design on this platform, you're not chasing obsolescence — you're building on a foundation that will be there for the life of your product.
The bottom line
The ANZLPRFSOM65DR puts 6T6R wideband RF capability, heterogeneous Arm processing, and programmable logic into a 9 × 13 cm module that sips under 1 watt in standby. It eliminates the need for external RF data converters, slashes PCB area, and brings what was previously a rack-mounted capability into the palm of your hand.
We're ready to show you what it can do.
👉 Book a demo — reach out to us directly or email AvnetANZ@avnet.com