DSP & FPGA board features Gen2 PCIe interface

 In particular, the device is well suited to implementations where it interfaces with other boards based around Intel processors, such as those available from Concurrent Technologies.

The VPX-D16A4-PCIE complements CommAgility’s existing VPX-D16A4, which provides similar functionality, but is aimed primarily at wireless applications. Rather than 20Gbaud RapidIO links, the VPX-D16A4-PCIE includes a 10Gbaud 2x PCIe interface to the VPX backplane for each of the two on-board Texas Instruments SoC devices.

The board is based around a TI TCI6638K2K KeyStone-based SoC and a TI TMS320C6678 SoC. Between them, the SoCs contain sixteen C66x DSP cores and four ARM Cortex-A15 cores, as well as baseband and networking accelerators. Closely coupled with TI’s HyperLink bus and Gigabit Ethernet, the SoCs each feature a 2Gb DDR3 memory bank.

The VPX-D16A4-PCIE, which is available in conduction cooled or air cooled versions, supports PCI, Ethernet, CPRI, Multi-Gigabit Transceiver (MGT) and RF or analogue I/O, making it a flexible solution.

For additional I/O or co-processing, the main DSP is connected to a Xilinx Kintex-7 K325T FPGA via PCIe and the AIF2 CPRI interface. This also features Gigabit Ethernet, as well as its own backplane MGT connections. To enable interfacing to an RTM with specialised I/O, the FPGA features multiple LVDS, GPIO and serial connections to the P2 connector. For flexible generation of RF clocks from a standard reference clock input, the device also features a PLL.

For application and data storage, the main DSP and FPGA each feature a large bank of flash memory, with FLASH upgrades and boot selection managed in conjunction with the Board Management Controller for maximum security.

To accelerate customer development, a full Linux BSP and example software support is provided. This is based on TI’s Multicore Software Dev Kit 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.

Glen Fawcett, CEO, Concurrent Technologies, said: “The VPX-D16A4-PCIE complements our range of SBCs and provides the high signal processing performance that is needed for many of today’s applications in harsh environments.”

“Our customers now have a choice of two high performance processing boards in the rugged VPX form factor, allowing them to select PCIe or RapidIO to best meet their application requirements and put together a full system with other vendors’ boards, such as Concurrent Technologies,” commented Edward Young, Managing Director, CommAgility.

The VPX-D16A4-PCIE will be available in Q2 2015.