Board provides PowerPC, FPGA and high-speed gigabit serial interfaces

Feb 13, 2008 3:46 PM

Pentek, Inc. has released its model 4207, a high-performance digital signal-processing and data-acquisition system. This new board employs Freescale's MPC8641D Dual Core PowerPC AltiVec processor and a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX series FPGA.

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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 board combines many standard interfaces and protocols — VXS, PMC, XMC, PCI-X, PCI Express, gigabit Ethernet, RocketIO, Serial RapidIO, Fibre Channel, Xilinx Aurora and VME64x technologies — in one extremely flexible, single-slot solution. In addition, the on-board Fibre Channel interface makes the 4207 ideal for high-speed real-time recording at rates up to 800 MB/s.

The model 4207 is equipped with either a single-core MPC8641 or a dual-core MPC8641D executing at a maximum frequency of 1.5 GHz. These latest AltiVec Freescale PowerPC processors perform 128-bit parallel processing of multiple data elements — single-instruction, multiple-datastream — 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 2 GB DDR2 SDRAM is available to the processor for program and data memory, along with a nonvolatile 128-MB flash for initialization, self-test and boot code. Processor clock options are from 1.0 to1.5 GHz.

The Pentek model 4207 is priced at $14,725 with delivery 10 to 12 weeks ARO.