S4-AMC
Altera® Stratix® IV GX Reconfigurable AMC
Product Overview
Based on Altera’s Stratix IV GX FPGA, BittWare’s S4-AMC (S4AM) 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 S4AM features a high-density, low-power Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA designed specifically for serial I/O-based applications, creating a completely flexible, reconfigurable AMC. BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork, in conjunction with the FINe III Host/Control Bridge, greatly simplifies application development and integration of this powerful board. The board also provides an IPMI system management interface, a configurable 15-port AMC SerDes interface supporting a variety of protocols, and a front panel 4x SerDes interface supporting CPRI and OBSAI. Additionally, the board features 10/100 Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, two banks of DDR3 SDRAM, two banks of QDRII+ SRAM, and Flash memory for booting the FPGAs and FINe. Providing enhanced flexibility is the VITA 57-compliant FMC site which has an additional eight SerDes, 60 LVDS pairs, and six clocks.
Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA
The Altera Stratix IV GX was specifically designed for serial I/O-based applications requiring high-density, reconfigurable logic. The Stratix IV GX provides 27 full-duplex, multi-gigabit transceivers, 24 of which are high-performance supporting PCI Express (Rev 1.0/2.0), 10GigE, GigE, Serial RapidIO (Rev 1.0/2.0), and SerialLite II standards. It contains up to 530k equivalent LEs, over 20 Mbits of embedded memory, and 1,024 embedded 18x18 multipliers. The FPGA implements BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork and provides seamless routing of all on-board data, I/O, and memory.
Fat Pipes, Common Options, and I/O Interfaces
The Stratix IV GX FPGA interfaces to 3 ports (1, 2, & 3) in the AMC common options region, and 16 ports in the AMC fat pipes region (4 - 15, 17 - 20). These 19 ports provide a network data and control switch fabric interface on the AMC connector, with 12 supporting up to 6.25 GHz, 3 supporting up to 3.125 GHz, and the remaining 4 providing LVDS rear-panel I/O. All AMC clocks are also connected to the Stratix IV GX. The front panel provides an additional 4 SerDes via an Infiniband-type connector, along with 10/100 Ethernet, two RS-232 ports, and a JTAG port for debug support.
VITA 57 FMC Site for Processing and I/O Expansion
The FMC site provides 8 high-performance SerDes and 60 LVDS pairs, along with 6 clocks. The connector is compliant with the VITA-57 mezzanine standard for FPGA IO, enabling the S4AM to be customized to individual needs.
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 IV 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™ III Host/Control Bridge
BittWare’s FINe III Host/Control Bridge (see Figure 2) implements a complete control plane interface for the S4AM, 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 III provides GigE via the common options region, along with 10/100 Ethernet and an RS232 monitor port on the AMC front panel, and is connected to the FPGA via a local control bus.
Figure 2: FINe III Architecture Overview
Development Tools
BittWare offers complete software support for the S4AM 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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