Home > What's New > Upper Saddle River, NJ - June 30, 2009

Pentek Announces New SMP VxWorks Support for Feature-packed VXS I/O Processor Board

Dual-Core Freescale 1.5 GHz 8641D PowerPC Fabric-transparent gigabit serial crossbar switch Dual Optical Gigabit Serial Transceivers Dual PMC/XMC Mezzanine Board Sites Supports Serial RapidIO®, Fibre Channel®, Xilinx Aurora ® and more Xilinx Virtex® FPGA for Custom DSP and Serial Protocols

Pentek, Inc., one of the pioneers of VME board-level technology, today released Wind River's VxWorks® operating system support for its Model 4207, the company's flagship processor board for high-performance I/O and data acquisition systems. Coupling the leading real-time OS for embedded systems to this PowerPC and FPGA platform flows stems from its target applications and wide market acceptance.

The new VxWorks Board Support Package (BSP) provides software developers with a complete library of hardware-initialization, control and application functions fully compatible with Wind River's Workbench development environment.

"VxWorks adds low-latency and deterministic real-time control of the many hardware resources and interfaces available on the Model 4207," said Rodger Hosking, vice president, Pentek. "Engineers familiar with this proven and highly-effective operating system and Tornado development tools can boost productivity to speed application development," he added.

The Model 4207 is uniquely designed for connectivity. The fabric-transparent, zero-latency crossbar switch connects the PowerPC, XMC module sites, the VXS connector, front panel optical transceivers, Fibre Channel controller, and FPGA ports together using high-speed gigabit serial data paths.

"The switch simply passes the gigabit serial traffic from one port to another, totally independent of any particular protocol. Multiple data streams can be sent through the switch simultaneously, even if they have different protocols," added Marc Ruocco, Pentek product manager. "For example, the two front panel optical ports can be connected to the Fibre Channel controller to support an 800 MB/sec VxWorks file system on an attached disk array."

The Model 4207 is uniquely designed for connectivity. The fabric-transparent, zero-latency crossbar switch connects the XMC module sites, optical and VXS connectors, Fibre Channel interface, FPGA and processor resources to high-speed gigabit serial data paths. The switch simply passes the gigabit serial traffic from one port to another, totally independent of any particular protocol. Multiple data streams can be sent through the switch simultaneously, even if they have different protocols.

The Model 4207 brings to designers extraordinary power, speed and connectivity in a single-slot solution, making it well suited for wideband, data acquisition and recording, real-time digital signal processing and software radio applications.

Powerful Processing

The Model 4207 is equipped with either a single-core MPC8641 or a dual-core MPC8641D executing at a maximum frequency of 1.5 GHz. These AltiVec Freescale PowerPC processors perform 128-bit parallel processing and deliver DSP floating-point processing rates of up to 12,000 GFLOPS. The processor includes built-in gigabit serial fabric support for 4x Serial RapidIO.

User-Programmable FPGA and Aurora Engine

The Model 4207 includes an optional on-board Xilinx Virtex-4 FX Series FPGA, the XC4VFX60 or XC4VFX100. Two 4X RocketIO ports provide high-speed serial paths between the FPGA and the crossbar switch for connection to other parts of the board, including the processor, VXS interface and XMC sites. A built-in Xilinx Aurora protocol engine, DMA controller and PCI-X interface simplify data transfers to and from the FPGA and two 256 MB banks of DDR2 SDRAM attached to the FPGA.

Developers can take advantage of unused FPGA resources to implement custom signal-processing algorithms with Pentek's GateFlow® FPGA Design Kit. The kit includes VHDL source files and works in conjunction with the Xilinx ISE Foundation design tools.

Compatible Hardware Products and Development Tools for a Variety of Platforms

The 4207 is compatible with any COTS VME, VXS, PMC or XMC module, including Pentek's--all fully supported with compatible VxWorks drivers.

Photos and Attachments

• 4207.jpg