Able to tackle both high-bandwidth pre-processing and sophisticated back-end processing in one 6U VME64/VITA 41 product, the Phoenix VPF2 from VMetro is a rugged commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) DSP card that integrates a Freescale MPC8641D processor, two Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs, and a VXS-based high-speed serial interconnect fabric. The MPC8641D dual-core processor is based on Power Architecture technology.
The cores run at up to 1.25 GHz with 2 Gbytes of memory to support operating systems such as VxWorks and Linux. Integrated within the processor is a complete I/O subsystem, including two Gigabit Ethernet ports, serial I/O, dual DDR/DDR2 memory controllers, a VME interface, and independent x8 PCI Express links to the Xilinx FPGAs and the XMC/PMC site. The VPF2 includes Ethernet options that support both RJ45 and optical interfaces or backplane I/O.
Closely coupled to the MPC8641D are two Xilinx Virtex-5 SX95T FPGAs, optimized for DSP, or LX110T FPGAs, optimized for high-performance logic. With their on-chip serial transceivers, either of the Virtex-5 options provides high-bandwidth, off-board serial communications channels to processing and I/O subsystems. Since the FPGAs connect to fast I/O streams, they can pre-process incoming data in real time without bottlenecks.
The company also provides TransComm, a data-streaming communications toolkit, to speed up the development process. The toolkit makes it easier to connect VPF2 FPGA-centric systems together, allowing the user to focus on key IP core development. Four 4M-by-18-bit banks of QDR SRAM and two 64M-by-16-bit SDRAM support both FPGA devices. These memories allow large data sets, such as frame buffers or large fast Fourier transform information, to be stored locally for maximum FPGA performance.
PRICING AND AVAILABILITY
The Phoenix VPF2 is scheduled to ship during this quarter. Contact the company for price information.
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