GT-6U-VME
Ruggedizable Hybrid Signal Processing 6U VME/VXS (VITA 41) Board
Product Overview
BittWare’s GT-6U-VME (GTV6) is a rugged 6U VME/VXS (VITA 41) board designed for demanding multiprocessor-based applications. The hybrid processing architecture takes advantage of both FPGA and DSP technology to provide a complete solution for applications requiring flexibility and adaptability along with high-end signal processing. The board features two high-density Altera Stratix II GX FPGAs, two clusters of two ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC processors from Analog Devices, a front panel interface supplying four channels of high-speed SerDes tranceivers, and an extensive back panel interface including VXS. The board can achieve simultaneous on- and off-board data transfers at a rate of 5 GBytes/s via BittWare ATLANTiS FrameWork implemented in the Altera Stratix II GX FPGAs. The board also provides a large amount of on-board memory with up to 3 GBytes of DDR2 SDRAM, as well as 128 MBytes of Flash memory for booting the FPGAs and DSPs.
Altera Stratix II GX FPGA
At the heart of the GTV6 are two state-of-the-art Altera Stratix II GX FPGAs, each containing up to 132,540 equivalent LEs, 6.7 Mbits of RAM, 252 embedded 18x18 multipliers, 63 DSP blocks, and 8 PLLs. Each FPGA provides pre-, post-, or co-processing to complement one 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 GTV6 features two clusters of two ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC DSPs, which are interconnected by a 64-bit cluster bus running at 83.3 MHz. The ADSP-TS201 processor operates at up to 500 MHz, providing 3 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 GOPS 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 FPGA.
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 Host/Control Bridge (see Figure 2) implements a complete control plane interface for the GTV6, 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 supports a 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI interface as well as GigE. This gives control plane access to the DSPs, Flash, and FPGA control registers via VME using the Tundra Tsi148 PCI-VME bridge, or via GigE. It also allows the DSPs low-overhead access to the host, Flash, and Ethernet.
Figure 2: FINe II Architecture Overview
Development Tools
BittWare offers complete software support for the GTV6 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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