CommAgility announces high-performance AdvancedMC card for wireless front-end applications

The standard variant has an LX240T-2 FPGA, providing a cost-effective processing solution. Optionally, the board can be configured with the LX550T-2 version of the FPGA, providing over half a million logic elements and making the AMC-V6 suitable for the most demanding applications.

A broad range of high speed I/O options are provided. Serial RapidIO (SRIO) V2.1 at speeds of up to 20Gbps per port is supported by an IDT CPS-1848 SRIO switch.

The board provides three front panel SFP+ optical interfaces that provide flexible high-speed links, and are configurable as CPRI, OBSAI, Gigabit Ethernet, SRIO or other standards. Alternatively, dual mini-SAS connectors to the SRIO switch and the FPGA’s GTX ports offer up to 40Gbps of front panel I/O.

The FPGA AMC includes two banks of DDR3 SDRAM with multiple high bandwidth buses: 128Mbytes of 16-bit memory and 256Mbytes of 32-bit. 128Mbytes of Flash memory is also provided, which can be used as storage for multiple FPGA configurations and additional software. CommAgility glue logic provides board control and FPGA configuration via local SPI interfaces or SRIO, leaving the main FPGA completely free for customer application code.

Timing and synchronisation is achieved via front panel SMB or backplane clock I/O. Optionally a GPS module can be fitted, in which case no additional timing equipment is required, significantly reducing systems complexity.


Edward Young, managing director at CommAgility, said, By including the Virtex-6 FPGA and IDT’s CPS-1848 SRIO switch, we have designed a module that meets the highest requirements for processing power and fast I/O, while giving engineers the flexibility they need. AMC-V6 is the perfect platform for LTE and LTE-Advanced test and base station development and provides a cornerstone of next generation baseband processing.

The new module is a single-width mid-size PICMG AMC.0 R2.0 Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC), and is tested to work with industry standard MicroTCA chassis. It can also operate standalone, with suitable power and cooling. A range of build options is available, and further customisation is possible in volume, to enable the best technical and commercial fit to a customer application to be achieved.