DSP Card Blends Dual-Core PowerPC Processor, Virtex FPGAs

Able to tackle both high-bandwidth pre-processing and sophisticated back-end processing in one 6U VME64/VITA 41 product, the Phoenix VPF2 from VMetro is a rugged commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) DSP card that integrates a Freescale MPC8641D processor, two Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs, and a VXS-based high-speed serial interconnect fabric. The MPC8641D dual-core processor is based on Power Architecture technology.

The cores run at up to 1.25 GHz with 2 Gbytes of memory to support operating systems such as VxWorks and Linux. Integrated within the processor is a complete I/O subsystem, including two Gigabit Ethernet ports, serial I/O, dual DDR/DDR2 memory controllers, a VME interface, and independent x8 PCI Express links to the Xilinx FPGAs and the XMC/PMC site. The VPF2 includes Ethernet options that support both RJ45 and optical interfaces or backplane I/O.

Closely coupled to the MPC8641D are two Xilinx Virtex-5 SX95T FPGAs, optimized for DSP, or LX110T FPGAs, optimized for high-performance logic. With their on-chip serial transceivers, either of the Virtex-5 options provides high-bandwidth, off-board serial communications channels to processing and I/O subsystems. Since the FPGAs connect to fast I/O streams, they can pre-process incoming data in real time without bottlenecks.

The company also provides TransComm, a data-streaming communications toolkit, to speed up the development process. The toolkit makes it easier to connect VPF2 FPGA-centric systems together, allowing the user to focus on key IP core development. Four 4M-by-18-bit banks of QDR SRAM and two 64M-by-16-bit SDRAM support both FPGA devices. These memories allow large data sets, such as frame buffers or large fast Fourier transform information, to be stored locally for maximum FPGA performance.