Mercury’s New Fiber I/O Module Is First in Industry to Transfer and Process Data Across 16 Channels

With a maximum data transfer capacity of 80 Gbps, the module is well suited to support the high-bandwidth digitized I/O created by various commercial and defense applications including the current generation of advanced ISR sensors.

“This new solution leads the market in both channel density and FPGA performance per slot,” said Ian Dunn, Vice President and General Manager of Mercury’s Microwave and Digital Solutions Group. “It adds a critical capability for creating balanced designs in sensor processing subsystems, by providing an extremely high-bandwidth I/O interface, sufficient to match the new levels of processing power delivered by current multi-core technology. It is also based on the OpenVPX and FMC industry standards, simplifying future technology upgrades.”

Each of the 16 channels of fiber supports a full duplex data rate of up to 5 Gbps, while the three FPGAs enable on-board preprocessing of data streams for maximum application efficiency. The fiber channels are supported on two Optical Interface FPGA Mezzanine Cards; each FMC has two 4x QSFP connections supporting eight channels of 2.5 Gbs sFPDP or two channels of 10 GigE. The FPGAs can be configured with a range of IP, enabling signal processing algorithms and protocol implementations. A serial RapidIO backplane connection provides high-speed communication with other subsystem modules.