BittWare adopts VITA 57 FPGA MC standard

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1 April 2009 Computer/Embedded Technology

BittWare has adopted the VITA 57 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) standard on its new ‘S4’ family of board-level signal processing solutions.

FMC provides an industry standard for expanding processing or I/O via mezzanine cards that connect to FPGAs on the carrier card. Electrically, the FMC connector supports high-speed serial (SerDes) ports, LVDS, clocks and single-ended signalling, providing a wide range of options and flexibility to the user. Similarly, the mechanical format of the FMC supports a variety of standard carrier board formats including AdvancedMC (AMC), VME, VXS and VPX, and can be air-cooled or conduction-cooled.

The addition of an FMC site on BittWare’s S4 family of FPGA boards, based on Altera’s 40 nm Stratix IV FPGAs, allows customers to support a broad range of applications simply by adding specific I/O or processing via various FMCs. Coupled with BittWare’s ATLANTiS framework for FPGAs, the FMCs also facilitate design re-use of FPGA implementations. In addition to supporting VITA 57 on its S4 family of signal processing hardware, BittWare will also be releasing its own family of FMCs for I/O and processing expansion.

Each onboard FPGA supports 530 000 equivalent logic elements, 20,3 Mb of RAM, and 1024 embedded multipliers. Onboard connections to the FPGA also provide up to 27 full-duplex, multigigabit transceivers, 24 of which support data rate speeds of 8,5 Gbps. The FPGA supports a number of protocols, including PCI Express Gen1 and Gen2 and Serial RapidIO.

BittWare’s ATLANTiS framework provides the Stratix IV GX FPGA with fully validated board-level physical interfaces to I/O, communications and memory, along with DMA engines and resource arbitration, simplifying application development and integration. A standard, open data interconnect fabric implemented using Altera’s streaming Avalon interface allows the ATLANTiS modules to be easily connected. Similarly, a standard control fabric using memory-mapped Avalon allows ATLANTiS modules to be controlled and coordinated.

BittWare’s FINe bridge implements a complete host/control bridge for the S4 product family with extensive software support, removing that complexity from the data plane, I/O and processing implemented on the FPGA. The first product in the S4 Family is the S4-AMC, a mid-size, single wide AdvancedMC. The family will also include a 3U VPX board, and a 6U VPX board – all with onboard VITA 57-compliant FMC sites.

BittWare offers a suite of development tools to aid developing and debugging applications for the S4 family. These software tools provide host interface libraries, a variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools, and debug tools. This tool set is comprised of the DSP21k toolkit, and DSP21k porting kit.

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BittWare adopts VITA 57 FPGA MC standard

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