Red Pitaya is small measurement instrument built around Xilinx' Zynq SoC integrating a dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, peripheral devices and FPGA fabric. The chip drives two 14-bit DA converters and two 14-bit AD converters at 125MSps. Switching transistors in CMOS circuits at such speed requires quite a lot of power, which is dissipated in a form of heat. The board gets hot. Even though the SoC and the converters are cooled by a heat spreader, after several minutes the input connectors and the heat sink become too hot to touch.
