Product category:
VMEbus Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Pentek | Subject: Pentek207 board
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 29 January 2008
VMEbus board provides serial resources
Pentek's Model 4207board brings to designers power, speed and connectivity in a single-slot solution.
Pentek has released its Model 4207 board, employing Freescale's MPC8641D Dual Core PowerPC AltiVec Processor and a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX series FPGA In addition, Pentek's 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
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 14 Apr 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Model 4207 brings to designers 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.
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Rodger Hosking, Vice President, Pentek said "The crossbar switch, the two PMC/XMC sites and the user-programmable FPGA offer customers the connectivity and flexibility they need to handle a tremendous range of tough applications".
"What's more, the on-board fibre channel interface makes the 4207 suitable for high-speed real-time recording at rates up to 800Mbyte/s".
The Model 4207 is equipped with either a single-core MPC8641 or a dual-core MPC8641D executing at a maximum frequency of 1.5GHz.
The very latest AltiVec Freescale PowerPC processors, they perform 128bit parallel processing of multiple data elements (single-instruction, multiple-data stream) and deliver DSP floating-point processing rates of up to 12,000 Gflops.
The processor includes built-in gigabit fabric support with both 8x PCI Express and 4x Serial RapidIO serial data ports.
Up to 2Gbyte DDR2 SDRAM is available to the processor for program and data memory, along with a nonvolatile 128MB Flash for initialisation, self-test and boot code.
Processor clock options are available from 1.0 to 1.5GHz.
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 2Gbyte of DDR2 SDRAM along with 128Mbyte 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.
The fabric-transparent crossbar switch of the Model 4207 offers 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.
Because all high-speed interfaces on the board connect through the switch, paths can be configured to meet specific requirements.
For example, XMC modules can transfer data through the switch to the on-board FPGA, to the processor, to the other XMC or to another board over the VXS connector.
Similar types of connections are available for other resources, using any protocol that the connected devices support, including Serial RapidIO, PCIExpress, Xilinx Aurora and InfiniBand protocols.
"The Model 4207 has all the resources customers need for extremely high-performance systems".
"With virtually every major high-speed interconnection capability, the Model 4207 is well suited for high-speed real-time recording, wideband data acquisition, real-time digital signal processing and software radio".
"However, by depopulating features, lower-cost versions of the board can also handle relatively simple systems, like a single-board computer with a PowerPC and single PMC module", says Hosking.
""By standardising on the Model 4207, systems integrators will find that this one board scales very nicely to a wide range of applications".
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