Curtiss-Wright Ready With VPX

Jan. 26, 2006

Curtiss-Wright Embedded Computing (CWEC) was pushing VITA-46 (VPX) and VITA-48 (VPX-REDI). VPX boards are now starting to come out of the woodwork and rugged REDI boards are following...

William G. Wong

Curtiss-Wright Embedded Computing (CWEC) was pushing VITA-46 (VPX) and VITA-48 (VPX-REDI). VPX boards are now starting to come out of the woodwork and rugged REDI boards are following.

It introduced the 6U CHAMP-AV6 (see Fig. 1), the first VITA 46 (VPX)-based digital signal processing (DSP) engine. The CHAMP-AV6 incorporates a quad 1.33-GHz 8641 PowerPC processor with DSP and Altivec vector processing capabilities. Each processor has dual 64-bit memory controllers. The board handles up to 2 Gbytes of DDR-II SDRAM. There is also 512 Mbytes of flash memory with write protection plus 128 kbytes of NVRAM.

The CHAMP-AV6 has four Serial RapidIO ports that deliver 10 Gbits/s of full duplex bandwidth. There is a multi-board synchronous time-stamping feature that allows incoming data to have a time stamp associated with it, making time-related calculations and sorting easier.

The board has one XMC site with x8 PCI Express support. There is an additional PCI Express interface for the backplane. There is also an on-board Gigabit Ethernet switch.

The board includes software support for VxWorks, Linux, and the SSSL DSP functions and Inter-Processor Communications libraries. Pricing for the CHAMP-AV6 starts at $16,500.

The VPX6-185 is similar to the CHAMP-AV6. It is a VPX board with four ASI ports and two PCI Express VITA 42 XMC/PMC sites. The XMC sites have access to the ASI switch. It hosts a single- or dual-core 1.5-GHz 8641 PowerPC processor with similar memory capabilities to the CHAMP-AV6. It has 3 Gigabit Ethernet ports and optional ports, such as a pair of Serial ATA ports. Pricing for the VPX6-185 starts at $10,500.

Curtiss-Wright also released their 3U CompactPCI SCP/DCP-124 (see Fig. 2) single board computer featuring Freescale’s 7447A/7448 PowerPC. It can handle up to 1Gbyte of DDR1 SDRAM with ECC, 256 Mbytes of flash memory with hardware write-protect, 8 Mbytes Flash for Permanent Alternate Protected Access Boot Site (PABS), and 128 kbytes of nonvolatile RAM.

On-board peripherals include two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two serial ports, four synchronous capable serial ports, 14-bit TTL discrete I/O, and a USB 2.0 port. The SCP/DCP-124 is available in conduction- and air-cooled versions. It supports VxWorks, Green Hills Integrity, and Linux.

Related Links Curtiss-Wright Embedded Controls
www.cwcembedd.com

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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