GX-AMC
Altera Stratix II GX AdvancedMC
Product Overview
Based on Altera’s Stratix II GX FPGA, BittWare’s GX-AMC (GXAM) is a mid-size, single wide AdvancedMC that can be attached to AdvancedTCA (Advanced Telecom Compute Architecture) carriers or other cards equipped with AMC bays, and used in MicroTCA systems. The GXAM features a high-density Altera Stratix II GX FPGA supported by BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork, a front panel I/O interface, a control plane interface via BittWare’s FINe II Host/Control Bridge, an IPMI system management interface, and a configurable 11x SerDes interface supporting a variety of protocols. It also provides 10/100/1000 Ethernet, two banks of DDR2 SDRAM, and Flash memory for booting the FPGA and FINe.
Altera Stratix II GX FPGA
At the heart of the GXAM is a state-of-the-art Altera Stratix II GX FPGA which has been specifically designed for serial I/O-based applications and provides up to 19 full-duplex high-performance, multi-gigabit transceivers supporting PCI Express, XAUI, GigE, Serial RapidIO, and SerialLite II standards. It contains up to 132,540 equivalent LEs, over 6.7 Mbits of RAM, 252 embedded 18x18 multipliers, 63 DSP blocks, and 8 PLLs. BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork, which enables seamless routing of the I/O, is implemented in the FPGA.
Fat Pipes, Common Options, and I/O Interfaces
The Altera Stratix II GX interfaces to 3 ports (1, 2, & 3) in the AMC common options region*, and 8 ports in the AMC fat pipes (4 - 11). These 11 ports provide a network data and control switch fabric interface on the AMC connector, configurable to support PCI Express, Serial RapidIO, GigE, or XAUI.
The Stratix II GX provides 4 SerDes and 76 pairs of LVDS I/O to the BittWare front-panel I/O module, and 16 LVDS pairs (8 in, 8 out) are provided for rear panel I/O via the AMC connector (ports 12 - 15, and 17 - 20). All AMC clocks are also connected to the Stratix II GX. The GXAM implements the standard Module Management Control Interface (IPMI).
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 GXAM, 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 GigE via the common options region, along with 10/100 Ethernet and an RS-232 monitor port on the AMC front panel, and is connected to the FPGA via a local control bus.
Figure 2: FINe II Architecture Overview
Development Tools
BittWare offers complete software support for the GXAM 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.
*Only available on the EP2SGX130
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