Product category:
VMEbus Boards and Assemblies
News Release from: Vmetro | Subject: Phoenix VXS family
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 26 April 2006
Building blocks enable demanding signal
processing
Vmetro has expanded the popular Phoenix VXS family of innovative products designed to enable system solutions for real-time multiprocessors with high-speed serial communications.
Vmetro has expanded the popular Phoenix VXS family of innovative products designed to enable system solutions for real-time multiprocessors with high-speed serial communications The new additions complement the Phoenix VPF1 dual-PowerPC dual-Virtex-II Pro FPGA VME/VXS DSP board, which is already shipping
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 23 Jul 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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The new boards comprise: the Phoenix CSW1 zero latency VXS switch card with fibre optic front panel I/O; the Phoenix 6821/6822 and 6826 215MHz and 2GHz VXS analogue-to-digital convertor boards with FPGAs; and the the Phoenix M6000 PowerPC VXS I/O controller with Fibre Channel, FPGA and two XMC sites.
These are further complemented by TransComm communications libraries and toolbox for system integration.
Together with the Phoenix VPF1 FPGA/PowerPC multiprocessor VXS board, the new VXS boards make up a very powerful family of building blocks for real-time embedded applications.
Further reading
Software spreads signal processing tasks
IPC software stack manages demanding signal processing applications such as radar and signal intelligence where the workload exceeds the processing capability of a single CPU.
Hybrid processors combine PowerPCs with FPGAs
6U boards provide high-performance digital signal processing capabilities for a wide range of demanding intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance applications.
Mezzanine card hosts FPGA-centric I/O
Innovative design, based on the emerging VITA 57.1 standard, makes it easier for developers to integrate FPGAs into their embedded system designs.
Phoenix products are available in air cooled and rugged conduction cooled builds variants as required by the customer's application.
The Phoenix CSW1 switch provides an innovative system solution with high-speed serial datalinks allowing the use of off-the-shelf VXS backplanes and optional front panel fibre-optic transceivers for flexible I/O options.
Many signal processing applications require VXS boards interconnected with point-to-point connections in a custom VXS backplane that use a simple protocol like Aurora or Serial FPDP because they cannot afford the overhead and latency of a switched fabric.
The downside is that each new application requires customers to bear the time and expense of developing a custom backplane, and if the configuration changes, a new backplane has to be developed.
The Phoenix CSW1 solves these problems by allowing customers to use off-the-shelf VXS backplanes and defining the routing topology in the CSW1 rather than the backplane.
Analogue data seamlessly integrates into Phoenix VXS systems using the Phoenix 6821/6822 and 6826 range of A/D convertors.
The key to these A/D convertor products is that they use VXS connections to provide the high-speed board-to-board interconnects to move the large amounts of data they can capture.
Customers' system development effort will be greatly simplified as a result of Vmetro integrating these A/D convertor products into the Phoenix family with support for communication across the high-speed serial VXS links.
The Phoenix M6000 enables designers to tailor system I/O requirements to customer requirements.
It offers a number of system functions including a "slot 1" controller single board computer (SBC) or a high-performance intelligent PMC/XMC carrier.
With its optional 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel controller, it can also manage high performance data recording capabilities.
In addition to the new VXS boards, Vmetro has announced TransComm, a low-latency communication "toolbox" to allow rapid deployment of VXS systems.
TransComm enables high performance FPGA to FPGA and FPGA to PowerPC communication with high efficiency and low overhead and footprint.
TransComm simplifies the development of the communications infrastructure for real-time systems and allows designers to focus on algorithms and system implementation.
The FPGA IP blocks in TransComm are available for use on all Vmetro Phoenix boards as well as for customers to incorporate into their in-house designs.
Vmetro continues to be the VXS market leader, delivering the first working VXS products.
The addition of these new products makes the Phoenix family of products ideal for building demanding real-time embedded computing solutions for applications such as radar, signal intelligence (Sigint), electronic intelligence (Elint), electronic warfare (EW) and real-time imaging applications.
"With these additions to the Phoenix family our customers can quickly build very impressive signal processing systems", says Vmetro's Jeremy Banks (Product Manager for Processor and I/O Products).
He adds: "The combination of high performance VXS, high performance FPGAs, A/D convertors, XMC sites, 2eSST interfaces, 4Gbit/s Fibre Channel links and TransComm communication suite enables our customers to bring their application performance to the next level".
Phoenix products are available 8-12 weeks ARO. Request a free brochure from Vmetro ...
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