Renaissance brings new bandwidth to VMEbus

An Emerson Network Power Embedded Computing product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 3, 2004

Motorola Computer Group describes the MVME6100 single-board computer as the first masterpiece in its VME Renaissance.

Motorola Computer Group describes the MVME6100 single-board computer as the first masterpiece in its VME Renaissance.

Motorola is first to market with a product that takes advantage of a radical new VMEbus to PCI-X bridge, using the VMEbus two-edge source synchronous transfer (2eSST) protocol for significantly faster VMEbus data transfer rates.

Transferring more than 300Mbyte/s on the VMEbus (compared with VME64's typical 40Mbyte/s transfer rate), the MVME6100 also preserves more than 20 years of VMEbus legacy by remaining compatible with previous generations of VMEbus products and protecting users existing investment in VMEbus technology.

"The MVME6100's innovative design uses carefully chosen technology to give optimum throughput and breakthrough data transfer rates through every part of the system", said Dave Barker, Product Manager, Motorola Computer Group.

"We've balanced the processing, memory, bus and I/O subsystems to dramatically increase performance for VMEbus applications".

Using the Tundra Tsi148 in 2eSST mode, the MVME6100 transfers data across the VMEbus at 320Mbyte/s.

The Vmetro Vanguard VMEbus 2eSST analyser was used to measure burst transfer rates of 310Mbyte/s and for sustained transfer rates of 300Mbyte/s.

Key features of the MVME6100 include: a Motorola MPC7457 1.3 GHz PowerPC processor; Tsi148 PCI-X bus to VMEbus bridge with 2eSST protocol for 320Mbyte/s transfer rate across standard VMEbus; a 128bit AltiVec coprocessor for vector processing; up to 2Gbyte DDR ECC memory; two 64bit PCI-X bus interfaces, one dedicated to 100MHz PMC support and the other to the VMEbus bridge at 133MHz; dual 64bit, 33/66/100MHz PMC-X expansion slot support; and dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces.

At release, the MVME6100 will be supported with a VxWorks board support package and a Linux support package.

The MVME6100 will be generally available in May of 2004 at an estimated price of $3995.