VMETRO announced its support for the Xilinx Virtex-5 family of FPGAs with two board-level products designed around that device family. The products, based on open standard form factors including PMC and PCI, are targeted at deployed embedded applications as well as development platforms.
The company’s first two products are based on the Xilinx LX50 and LX110 FPGAs (see the figure) . For PCI-based development platforms, VMETRO’s DEV-FPGA05, based on the Xilinx LX50 Virtex-5 FPGA, will be bundled with a software support package. This will allow Virtex-5 applications to be evaluated and developed at low cost. For deeply embedded applications, typically found in medical imaging or aerospace and defence systems, the PMC-FPGA05D PMC module with a Virtex-5 LX110 will be available.
Architecturally, both the PMC- and PCI-based products share a common structure to maximise the FPGAs’ performance. This includes up to three 4Mbyte banks of QDR II SRAM and two 64Mbyte banks of DDR2 SDRAM connected directly to the Virtex-5 FPGA. The memory architecture means that large data sets, such as entire video images, FFTs, and DSP vector arrays can be stored locally for fast processing and data buffering.
SDRAM provides valuable high-volume storage. In addition, there’s 256Mbit flash for turnkey FPGA configuration to simplify application deployment. Fast data I/O is provided by directly coupling I/O modules and parallel interfaces, including PCI-X, to help stream data straight to the FPGA without introducing bottlenecks. I/O modules already developed include parallel LVDS, CameraLink, and RS422. Additional custom modules can be designed by development engineers or VMETRO.