GT-3U-cPCI
Ruggedized Hybrid Signal Processing 3U CompactPCI Board
Product Overview
BittWare’s GT-3U-cPCI (GT3U) is a ruggedized 3U CompactPCI board designed for demanding multi-processor based applications requiring complete flexibility and adaptability. The GT3U features a large Altera Stratix II GX FPGA, one cluster of four ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC processors from Analog Devices, a front panel interface supplying four channels of high-speed SerDes tranceivers, and a back panel interface providing RS-232/RS-422 and 10/100 Ethernet. Simultaneous on-board and off-board data transfers can be achieved at a rate of 2 GB/s via BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork, which is implemented in the Stratix II GX FPGA. The board also provides a large amount of on-board memory, including 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM and 64 MB of flash memory for booting the FPGA and DSPs.
Altera Stratix II GX FPGA
At the heart of the GT3U is an Altera Stratix II GX FPGA containing 90,960 equivalent LEs, 4.5 Mbits of RAM, 192 embedded 18x18 multipliers, 48 DSP blocks, and 8 PLLs. The FPGA provides pre-, post-, or co-processing to complement the TigerSHARC processing cluster, while also enabling seamless routing of the TigerSHARC I/O at a rate of over 2 GB/s via BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork.
ADSP-TS201S DSPs
The GT3U features a single cluster of four ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC DSPs, which are interconnected by a 64-bit cluster bus running at up to 100 MHz. The ADSP-TS201 processor operates at up to 500 MHz, providing 3.0 GFLOPS of peak processing power. Because of its superscalar architecture, the ADSP-TS201 is also efficient at fixed-point processing, with each DSP supporting 12 BOPS of processing. Along with 24 Mbits of on-chip RAM, each DSP also boasts four high-speed LVDS link ports. Each full-duplex link port is comprised of a 4-bit transmit and a 4-bit receive channel and can support up to 500 MBytes/s in each direction for a total maximum throughput of up to 1 GByte/s. Two link ports from each DSP are used to create an interprocessor communications ring, and the remaining two link ports are routed to the ATLANTiS FrameWork.
ATLANTiS™ FrameWork
BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork for FPGA development (see Figure 1) provides reconfigurable FPGA components, along with the infrastructure necessary to implement, simulate, synthesize, validate, and deploy a complete FPGA application on the Stratix II GX. ATLANTiS FrameWork delivers fully validated FPGA physical interfaces for all board-level I/O and communications, including high-speed SerDes and external memory control, along with resource management components such as buffering, DMA engines, and arbitration. Each component can be easily monitored and controlled via an addressed path implemented using Altera’s open standard Avalon Memory Mapped Interface. Similarly, Altera’s open standard Avalon Streaming Interface is used to implement point to point data transport between ATLANTiS components. A set of reconfigurable fabric components such as multiplexers, switches, decoders, and FIFOs expand the interconnect options for both memory mapped and streaming interfaces. ATLANTiS FrameWork removes the burden of reinventing low-level IP for the FPGA, thus freeing developers to focus on unique value-added development.
Figure 1: ATLANTiS FrameWork Architecture Overview
FINe™ II Host/Control Bridge
BittWare’s FINe II Host/Control Bridge (see Figure 2) implements a complete control plane interface for the GT3U, facilitating separate control and data planes, and greatly simplifying the development of data plane I/O and processing. Extensive software support is provided via BittWare’s BittWorks Toolkit, which is tightly integrated with the FINe.
The FINe provides the DSPs with low-overhead access to the host via the 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI interface. It also provides a general purpose peripheral bus that allows the DSPs to access the Flash, 10/100 Ethernet, and the RS232/RS422 UART interface. It provides host access to the DSPs, Flash, and FPGA control registers.
Figure 2: FINe II Architecture Overview
Development Tools
BittWare offers complete software support for the GT3U with its BittWorks software tools. BittWorks is a suite of software development tools, designed to make developing and debugging applications for BittWare’s signal processing boards easy and efficient, regardless of whether the hardware is on the local machine or being accessed remotely. The BittWorks software tools include host interface libraries, a wide variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools, debug tools, and I/O drivers, all of which are tightly integrated with the ATLANTiS FrameWork and the FINe.
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