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.