“Industry’s first” VME/VXS board with combination of PowerPC, FPGA and multiple high-speed gigabit serial interfaces

Pentek, Inc., one of the pioneers of VME board-level technology, has released its Model 4207, the company's flagship product for high-performance digital signal processing and data-acquisition systems. Building upon the success and wide market acceptance of Pentek’s previous processor board designs, this new board employs Freescale's MPC8641D Dual Core PowerPC AltiVec™ Processor and a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX Series FPGA.

In addition, Pentek's unique fabric-transparent crossbar switch bridges a wealth of gigabit serial resources, including the PowerPC and FPGA, two XMCs, dual VXS ports, dual Fibre Channel ports and two optical serial transceivers. Native protocols support PCI Express, Serial RapidIO, Fibre Channel and Aurora, all accommodated by the crossbar switch. Up to 4 GB of fast DDR2 SDRAM simplifies data buffering and boosts real-time signal processing.

The Model 4207 thereby brings to designers extraordinary power, speed and connectivity in a single-slot solution, making it well suited for wideband, data acquisition-and-recording, real-time digital signal-processing and software-radio applications.

The Model 4207 includes options for an on-board Xilinx Virtex-4 FX Series FPGA, the XC4VFX60 or XC4VFX100. Two 4X RocketIO ports provide a high-speed serial path between the FPGA and the crossbar switch for connection to other parts of the board, including the processor, VXS interface and XMC sites. These ports can also be configured as four 2X paths. The FPGA can be optionally equipped with 1 or 2 GB of DDR2 SDRAM along with 128 MB flash.

Developers can take advantage of unused FPGA resources to implement custom signal-processing algorithms and to process captured data in real time. To simplify FPGA development tasks, Pentek offers its GateFlow FPGA Resources.

Pentek's GateFlow FPGA Design Kit enables the onboard FPGA to be configured by the user for implementation of custom pre-processing functions such as FFTs, FIR filters and software-radio blocks. The kit includes VHDL source files and works in conjunction with the Xilinx ISE Foundation design tools.

In addition to the processing power described, the fabric-transparent crossbar switch of the Model 4207 offers extraordinary high-speed connectivity. Since the processor configures all routing paths, the switch simply passes the gigabit serial traffic from one port to another, totally independent of any particular protocol. Multiple data streams can be sent through the switch simultaneously, even if they have different protocols.

Pentek