Mercury introduces its flagship Model 5560 FPGA co-processing board

Why It Matters

Electronic warfare and spectrum processing applications used by land, air, and sea-based platforms must capture input signals, process them, and deliver output signals on extremely short timelines.

Near-peer adversaries are investing in capabilities to achieve split-second information advantages in warfare, and the US and its allies must rely on trusted, secure processing to maintain technological superiority.

Many existing defence systems use field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as co-processers to accelerate data processing at the edge, but they run into bottlenecks when data is transferred to memory that is positioned elsewhere on the board, which delays decision making.

Mercury’s Model 5560 is directly integrated with the on-chip HBM via the Versal Programmable Network-On-Chip, resulting in up to an 8x increase in bandwidth and 63% lower power compared to a system using external memory.

With gigabytes of HBM directly accessible by the Versal HBM adaptable engines, the overall amount of data that can be pushed through the system can be significantly increased. Model 5560 is the flagship in Mercury’s portfolio of co-processors that use HBM technology, joining the Model 5585 and 5586 modules.

“The climate of continuous urgency in the geopolitical environment is escalating demand for faster, more powerful and secure aerospace and defence systems,” said Kevin Beals, Vice President and General Manager of Mercury Signal Solutions. “By collaborating with technology leaders like AMD, we put the most powerful American innovations into the hands of those who ensure the safety of our nation.”

“The combined power of high capacity on-chip High Bandwidth Memory, using our unique 2.5D packaging technology, coupled with our advanced Programmable Network-On-Chip technology, which is integrated into the highly specialised Model 5560 architecture, results in solution that is purpose-built for extremely demanding customer requirements,” said Manuel Uhm, Director of Silicon Marketing, AMD.     Processing massive amounts of data at the edge with Model 5560

16GB of Versal high-bandwidth memory

• Versal HBM series delivers memory bandwidth of up to 820GB/sec, 8x the bandwidth of DDR5 memory at 63% lower power
• Four 100GigE high-speed optical data pipes for an aggregate data throughput rate of 50GB/sec
• Navigator FPGA design kit (FDK) and board support package (BSP) for operational control and IP development