[Engineering Feature]
All A-Board!
To satisfy the needs of aerospace and defense applications, compact, multicore, low-power computer boards are achieving greater levels of computational capabilities per watt.
According to Pentek, its model 4207 is the industry’s first VME/VXS SBC to integrate PowerPC, FPGA, and multiple high-speed gigabit serial interfaces (Fig. 4). It “combines so many standard interfaces and protocols, making it an extremely flexible single-slot solution,” says Rodger Hosking, a Pentek vice president. These interfaces and protocols include VXS, PMC, PCI-X, PCI Express, Gigabit Ethernet, Serial RapidIO, Xilinx’s RocketIO Ethernet transceiver, Fibre Channel, Xilinx’s Aurora FPGA technology, and VME6x technology.
Like VPX, the VITA 42 or XMC mezzanine standard is an open standard that supports high-speed, switched-fabric interconnect protocols on the PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) form factor. The XMC standard specifies a fifth connector that handles PCI Express and other highspeed serial interfaces like RapidIO and parallel RapidIO.
Targeting rugged environments, the ESMexpress (ANSI/VITA 59) mezzanine standard covers SBCs that can plug into PMC and XMC SBCs. MEN Micro’s PowerPC-based ESMexpress XM50 SBC accommodates up to 2 Gbytes of soldered DDR2 SDRAM with error-correcting code (ECC), in addition to SRAM and ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) (Fig. 5). The XM50 also supports USB flash memory.
A number of SBC and plug-in mezzanine- card manufacturers are introducing products based on the VPX and XMC standards, in both 3U and 6U form factors. These include SBCs that use both Intel and PowerPC processors for graphics, mass-storage, and switching applications.
The VPX6-185 SBC from Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing features a dual-core PowerPC (a singlecore option is available), 64 kbytes of level 1 cache and 1 Mbyte of level 2 cache per CPU core, up to 2 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM (SDRAM), up to 512 Mbytes of flash memory, and two high-performance memory controllers (Fig. 6).
Its high-performance I/O complement includes four Gigabit Ethernet ports, two PMC/XMC ports with PCI-X and PCI Express interfaces with an XMC I/O, an optional VME64 interface, a four-channel serial I/O, and a two-channel USB 2.0 I/O. Each of its four-lane fabric ports is individually selectable to be either a serial I/O or a PCI Express port. The SBC supports VxWorks and Linux operating systems, Continuum firmware, an SSL Altivec-optimized DSP library, and IPC software for serial I/O and inter-core communications.
Embracing VPX and XMC alike, Quantum 3D’s Sentiris 5140 XMC mezzanine graphics accelerator mezzanine card offers 256 Mbytes of DDR3 memory (Fig. 7). This real-time COTS-based product uses AMD’s ATI Radeon HD3650 graphics processing unit to deliver top-notch image quality and performance, according to the company.
“We see sensor technology in aerospace applications becoming more complex and requiring that SBCs and support mezzanine cards be located in the aircraft itself, instead of data being transmitted down to a basestation, which requires very wide bandwidths,” says Alan Commike, principal high-performance computer architect for Quantum 3D.
The Sentiris 5140 is supported on x86 architectures running Windows XP Pro and XP Embedded, as well as Linux operating systems. It uses eight or 16 lanes of PCI for communications. At 16 lanes, it features 4 Gbytes/s of data transfer to a host interface. There’s also an optional PMC connector.
ADVANCEDTCA Two of the newer serial buses used for telecommunications are the AdvancedTCA (Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture) and its sibling MicroTCA from the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG).
These open-architecture specifications allow SBC and mezzanine-card designers to fully take advantage of low-cost COTS components using networked topologies with improved thermal performance. They reduce the cost base of a board by eliminating the need for unnecessary support circuitry for communications functions.
Emerson Network Power Connectivity Solutions takes advantage of both buses in its PrAMC-7210 processor module and 10-Gbit ATCA processor blade mezzanine card. Powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.5 GHz with 4 Mbytes of L2 cache, the PrAMC-7210 suits applications that combine the advantages of multicore processing performance with high-speed serial transmissions like Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express. The card features a 16-core Cavium Octeon processor for high-performance computing applications.
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