February 22, 2005 Houston, TX and Oslo, Norway -- VMETRO, a developer of embedded, real-time boards and subsystems based on open standards such as VME, PCI, cPCI, and RACEway, today introduced its PMC-FPGA03F, a 64-bit PMC module. According to the company, the new module employs Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA and fiber-optic communications to provide application-specific processing coupled with long-distance optical connectivity.
According to a press release, the new FPGA-based module delivers powerful, application-specific processing when used in conjunction with a PMC-enabled processing board or I/O Controller. The company claims that by directly coupling fiber-optic communications with a user-programmable FPGA, the module can efficiently perform a host of demanding signal processing tasks on data before it reaches the host processor, including FFTs and digital receiver functions for software radio, data compression, and advanced protocol handling.
"The PMC-FPGA03F enables FPGA developers to directly interface to remote systems up to 500 meters apart, dramatically enhancing the capabilities of the onboard Xilinx Virtex II Pro device and flexibility of the module itself," contends Andy Stevens, VMETRO's vice president of Processing Solutions.
According to the release, other features of the module include:
* Large SDRAM data buffers* QDR-II memory banks* Integrated I/O and pre-processing* Four full duplex fiber-optic serial links operating at rates up to 3.125 Gbit/sec* Programmable transceivers supporting any compatible interface including fibre channel and serial FPDP* Options for both single and multimode optical transceiver configurations* A parallel 64-bit user data I/O port* VxWorks, Windows, and Linux host software support* Onboard flash memory for "turnkey" configuration* FPGA and Flash programming utilities, and IP cores for common functions such as FFTs and QR decomposition.