VPX SBC Blends FPGAs And Dual-Core PowerPC Processors

July 10, 2008

High-speed Aurora or Serial FPDP links feed dual Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs via a pair of FPGA mezzanine card (FMC/VITA 57) slots on VMetro’s latest VPX single-board computer (SBC). The HPE640 also includes two Freescale MPC8641D dual e600 Power

William G. Wong

High-speed Aurora or Serial FPDP links feed dual Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs via a pair of FPGA mezzanine card (FMC/VITA 57) slots on VMetro’s latest VPX single-board computer (SBC). The HPE640 also includes two Freescale MPC8641D dual e600 PowerPC cores. The PowerPC chips have access to 2 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM. Each FPGA has access to six banks of memory (36 Mbytes of SRAM via four banks, 256 Mbytes of DDR2 SDRAM via two banks). A Gigabit Ethernet switch provides four links to the backplane and to each MPC8641D. A matching Serial RapidIO switch provides a similar communication complement. Distributed communication is supported by VMetro’s FusionIPC, which works across the range of VMetro’s boards, including the quad FPGA FPE650 and the HPE720. The HPE720 has a single processor plus a pair of FPGAs driving an FMC slot and an XMC/FMC slot.

VMETRO
www.vmetro.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.