SF/GX-AMC
Altera Stratix® II GX AdvancedMC with 4 SFP
Product Overview
Based on Altera’s Stratix II GX FPGA, BittWare’s SF/GX-AMC (SF/GXAM) is a full-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 SF/GXAM features four small form-factor pluggable-plus (SFP/SFP+) compact optical transceiver connectors, a high-density Altera Stratix II GX FPGA, 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 AMC 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.
SFP 4x Front Panel Module
The SF/GXAM provides a four-cage SFP connector on the front panel with each transceiver providing support for virtually any serial communication standard, including: Fibre Channel, GigE, SONET, CPRI, and OBSAI. The four SFP SerDes channels are connected directly to the Stratix II GX FPGA. It also supports two front panel clock inputs.
Altera Stratix II GX FPGA
The Altera Stratix II GX was specifically designed for serial I/O-based applications requiring high-density, reconfigurable logic. The Stratix II GX provides 15 full-duplex high-performance, multi-gigabit transceivers supporting PCI Express, 10 GigE, GigE, Serial RapidIO, and SerialLite II standards. It contains up to 132,540 equivalent LEs, over 6700 kbits of embedded memory, 252 embedded 18x18 multipliers, 63 DSP blocks, and 8 PLLs. 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 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 10 GigE.
The Stratix II GX provides 16 LVDS pairs (8 in, 8 out) to the 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 SF/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 implements a complete control plane interface for the SF/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 it 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 SF/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.
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