VPX Module Brings DSP/FPGA Performance To Harsh Field Deployments
CommAgility’s rugged VPX-D16A4 DSP- and FPGA-based card, developed in the VITA 65 3U OpenVPX form factor, will find homes in applications such as software-defined radio (including LTE, Remote Radio Head, WiMax, and Cloud RAN), imaging, radar, and military. It supports SRIO, Ethernet, CPRI, and multi-gigabit transceiver (MGT) to the backplane, plus links to RF or analog I/O. The board is based around a Texas Instruments (TI) TCI6638K2K Keystone-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) and a TI TMS320C6678 SoC. Combined, the two contain 16 C66x DSP cores and four ARM Cortex-A15 cores, as well as baseband and networking accelerators. The SoCs are closely coupled with TI’s Hyperlink bus and Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). Each has 2-Gbyte DDR3 and a 20-Gbaud SRIO link to the VPX backplane. For added I/O or co-processing, the main digital signal processor is connected via PCI Express and the AIF2 CPRI interface to a Xilinx Kintex-7 K325T FPGA (with GbE and backplane MGT connections, plus LVDS, GPIO, and serial connections to the P2 connector). Conduction- and air-cooled versions of the board are available.