CommAgility announces signal processing VPX module with PCIe interface

CommAgility today announced the VPX-D16A4-PCIE, a rugged high performance DSP and FPGA based card in the compact VITA™ 65, 3U OpenVPX™ form factor, with a high speed Gen2 PCI Express (PCIe) interface.

The new module is ideal for applications such as electronic warfare (EW), software radio, imaging or radar that require very high signal processing performance in the robust VPX form factor for deployment in harsh environments. In particular, it is well suited to implementations where it interfaces with other boards based around Intel® processors, such as those available from Concurrent Technologies Plc.

The VPX-D16A4-PCIE complements CommAgility's existing VPX-D16A4, which provides similar functionality, but is aimed primarily at wireless applications. The main difference between the two modules is that the VPX-D16A4-PCIE includes a 10Gbaud 2x PCIe interface to the VPX backplane for each of the two on-board Texas Instruments (TI) System-on-Chip (SoC) devices, instead of the VPX-D16A4's 20Gbaud RapidIO links. The new board is based around a TI TCI6638K2K KeyStone™-based SoC and a TI TMS320C6678 SoC, which between them contain sixteen C66x DSP cores and four ARM® Cortex®-A15 cores, as well as baseband and networking accelerators.

The two SoCs are closely coupled with TI's HyperLink bus as well as Gigabit Ethernet. Each device has its own large 2Gbytes DDR3 memory bank. Glen Fawcett, CEO at Concurrent Technologies, said, "The new VPX-D16A4-PCIE complements our range of single board computers, and provides the high signal processing performance that is needed for many of today's applications in harsh environments." Edward Young, managing director at CommAgility, said, "Our customers now have a choice of two high performance processing boards in the rugged VPX form factor - so they can select PCIe or RapidIO to best meet their application requirements, and to help them put together a full system with other vendors' boards, such as Concurrent Technologies, when required."

The VPX-D16A4-PCIE is available as either conduction cooled or air cooled versions. For maximum flexibility in interfacing, it supports PCI, Ethernet, CPRI and Multi-Gigabit Transceiver (MGT) to the backplane plus links to RF or analogue I/O. For additional I/O or co-processing, the main DSP is connected via PCI Express and the AIF2 CPRI interface to a Xilinx Kintex-7 K325T FPGA, which also has Gigabit Ethernet and its own backplane MGT connections. The FPGA has multiple LVDS, GPIO and serial connections to the P2 connector to enable interfacing to an RTM with specialised I/O such as multi-channel RF or high speed ADC/DAC interfaces. It also has a PLL for flexible generation of RF clocks from a standard reference clock input. The main DSP and FPGA both have a large bank of flash memory for application and data storage, with FLASH upgrades and boot selection managed in conjunction with the Board Management Controller for maximum security. A full Linux BSP and example software support is provided to accelerate customer development, based on TI's Multicore Software Development Kit (MCSDK) for Linux and the Xilinx Vivado FPGA development suite. MIMOon's mi!SmallCellPHY™-TI is available fully integrated and tested, providing a complete LTE physical layer. The VPX-D16A4-PCIE will be available in Q2 2015. For pricing, please contact CommAgility. Intel is a trademark of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. OpenVPX is a trademark of VITA.