•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

Computer board features high-density FPGAs

Xilinx Virtex-5 chips operate with Freescale PowerPC

23rd March 2007 - Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing’s CHAMP-FX2 is an FPGA-based, reconfigurable compute engine in a 6U VPX-REDI (VITA 46/48) format. It mixes FPGA-based reconfigurable computing, PowerPC processing, and the high bandwidth of serial switched fabrics provided by the new VPX standards for use in markets such as defence and aerospace signal processing applications in harsh environments. The board has dual Virtex-5 LXT FPGAs and an AltiVec-enabled dual-core Freescale 8641 PowerPC processor in a heterogeneous FPGA/CPU where portions of an application reside on the processing resources best suited to their application. Serial RapidIO connects the three computational nodes via an on-board XMC mezzanine site with up to four 4-lane SRIO connectors to the backplane. The board’s memory support includes double data rate (DDR2) SDRAMs and quad data rate (QDR-II+) SRAMs. The Freescale 8641 processor provides dual Gigabit Ethernet. Software support is via the Continuum FXtools package that includes software and tools to support both PowerPC and FPGA development and provides BSP and support libraries for operating systems including VxWorks and Linux. For FPGA development it includes IP blocks. The board is available in both air- and conduction-cooled formats with cooling techniques are employed to handle high performance FPGA implementations.