Open VPX boards facilitate high performance system building

2nd March 2017

Alice Matthews

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With the introduction of two 6U Open VPX products from Interface Concept, building high performance EW, Radar and EO/IR systems has become reality. This concentrated technology package is a suitable solution when flexibility and performance are required. These two building blocks are designed to meet the most demanding needs of embedded high performance intensive-computing applications.

Two on-board Intel Core i7 (IC-INT-VPX6a) and one Freescale QorIQ T1042 or T2081 processors (IC-FEP-VPX6b) offer maximum computing power. The IC-INT-VPX6a SBC is available with up to 16GB of high bandwidth DDR3 SDRAM (1,333MHz) and comes with a rich complement of high-speed I/O. With regard to the IC-FEP-VPX6b, it features two banks of DDR3 SDRAM and one SRAM DDRII per Virtex-7 FPGA.

The IC-FEP-VPX6b FPGA board is equipped with two FMC slots for many functions (ADC, DAC, general IOs, video, high speed communication on various protocols). In addition, three PCIe advanced switches (two on the IC-INT-VPX6a and one on the IC-FEP-VPX6b) allow different coupling combination between the multicore processors, the FPGAs and the fabric links.

Basic firmware includes U-boot and a boot-loader developed by Interface Concept (initialisations and optimised PBITs). OS supported are LSP Linux distributions and VxWorks. Both products are available in standard and conduction-cooled grades. Providing data processing capabilities in a single-slot 6U VPX form factor, the IC-INT-VPX6a and IC-FEP-VPX6b serve as a suitable openarchitecture building-block for Defense next-gen C4ISR applications.