ZTE Communication Board

[bri3gel]

Hi and sorry to interrupt,

I am actually a FPGA guy and not located in the RF-field, so hopefully you guys could still give me some hints.
I came across a board that could be quite interesting for me, because it has a good amount of usable FPGA chips. The only problem is, that there is little to no information about this board, which I am told to be a ZTE 5G communication board. Moreover this board has a power connector, which looks similar to the ones used in DELL psu's. Does anybody know the pinout, so I could try to power this board up ?

Any hints  are welcome =)

Kind Regards

[Mads Barnkob]

I am not a RF or base station /cell site specialist, but I have taken apart and done teardown videos on about 10-15 3G/4G systems.

Normal supply voltage for this radio gear is 48VDC, some times it is grounded and other times its floating, not connected to the chassis ground. Your best bet is to reverse-engineer the tracks back from the local power supplies at the FPGAs back to the connector. If you are unlucky, then you need some enable signals buried somewhere in the small pins in the middle.

Generally I have found that there is very little information available on ICs inside these systems, a lot of it seems to be special product numbers or whole series of ICs that has no reference to any publically known components.

[bri3gel]

hi thanks for the reply. I guess I will try to start with a voltage of 12V and see, if something boots up .

I found this website : https://fccid.io/Q78-ZXMBW-E9200, but unfortunately not the same board.

[Da_Stier]

Hi,

If you are still trying to reuse the board.
I have another board made by Huawei.

On mine there is the same black power connector as on yours.
On mine all the large pins on the left are connected together, as are all the large pins on the right.
One set of pins is connected directly to the GND plane on the board, which is obviously GND.

The other set of pins is +48V on mine, which as Mads said is the standard voltage for such equipment.
Most of the times each board has its own local power supply blocks so even the logic board is supplied with 48V.

As you said, I would start to supply it with 5 Volts and slowly increse the voltage until something starts to work.
(Maybe you can monitor some logic voltage of a local regulator)

Hope this helps.

[Da_Stier]

Oh another thing I wondered.

How do you plan to use the board?
I guess the JTAG connection to each FPGA might be reverse engineerable (atleast if each device has its own connection, since all devices could be in a serial chain).
But I assume it will be close to impossible to use any port on any device without the schematics.

Do you plan to solder directly to the vias on each ball to use a port?