Product category:
VMEbus Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Mistral Solutions | Subject: Rugged Champ-FX card
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 23 April 2007
Rugged version of digital signal
processing card
New conduction-cooled rugged versions of the Champ-FX and Champ-FX2 DSP cards enable them to be used in harsh environments.
Mistral Solutions has made available a new conduction-cooled rugged version of the Champ-FX digital signal processor 6U VME64x and VITA-41 engines and the Champ-FX2, the first FPGA-based VPX-REDI (VITA 46/48) compute engine from Curtiss Wright Controls Embedded Computing These dual-FPGA boards are suitable for demanding signal processing applications like radar, sonar, and signal intelligence that must work in harsh environments
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 20 Jun 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Champ-FX is now available in a new conduction-cooled rugged version which makes the high-performance DSP card a suitable fit for many Mil COTS application environments and allows reconfigurable signal-processing computing to be used in the embedded defence and aerospace market.
The dual Xilinx Virtex-II Pro based Champ-FX fully meets Curtiss-Wright's Level 100 (-40 to 71C) and Level 200 (-40 to 85C) ruggedisation guidelines.
Curtiss Wright conduction-cooled cards are designed for use in high shock and vibration environments and are constructed with a novel advanced hybrid aluminum/copper frame, which provides mechanical stiffening while conducting heat from the electronic components to the edge of the card where it is transferred to the chassis.
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These conduction-cooled cards comply with the mechanical specifications controlled by the IEEE 1101.2 VME specification.
The Champ-FX is supported with the Champtools-FX design kit that provides reference designs and ready-to-use VHDL modules to implement memory interfaces, DMA, PCI, RocketIO and support for the Xilinx II Pro's two internal IBM PowerPC 405 processors.
The computing power of the FPGAs is complemented with more than 10Gbit/s of I/O capability, implemented with an array of technologies including high-speed differential serial RocketIO, XMC/PMC sites and StarFabric interfaces.
With both large DDR SDRAM and fast DDRII SRAM memory, the FPGAs have more than 8Gbit/s of memory bandwidth to service memory-intensive algorithms.
The Champ-FX2 combines the flexibility of Xilinx FPGA-based reconfigurable computing, high performance Power Architecture (PowerPC) processing, and the high bandwidth of serial-switched fabrics provided by the new VPX standards.
The board has dual high-performance Xilinx Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs and an AltiVec-enabled dual-core Freescale 8641 PowerPC processor.
It delivers the flexibility of reconfigurable computing with state-of-the-art general processing and VPX-level interprocessor communications bandwidth performance.
Its heterogeneous FPGA/CPU design enables developers to optimise their designs by hosting the portions of their application on the processing resources best suited to their application.
The board's high-end processing elements, rich I/O options, and rugged design make the Champ-FX2 a suitable platform for integrating FPGA processing into a rugged COTS-based system.
The Champ-FX2 uses the Serial RapidIO (SRIO), provided by the new VPX standard, to connect its three computational nodes and its onboard XMC mezzanine site with up to four 4-lane SRIO connectors to the backplane.
The board's memory support includes double data rate (DDR2) SDRAMs and quad data rate (QDR-II+) SRAMs that complement inter-node bandwidth by providing multiple, independent memory banks for each of the dual Virtex-5 FPGAs.
High-speed serial ports are provided to connect the FPGAs to each other, to the XMC site, and to front-panel or back-panel connections.
Champ-FX2 Software Support is provided by Continuum FXtools, a set of system and support software and tools, designed specifically to ease the developer's task of integrating FPGA-based computation into a larger heterogeneous multicomputer application.
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