VPF2 PowerPC MPC8641D, Dual User Programmable Virtex-5 FPGA VXS Digital Signal Processor

The VPF2 is a high-performance heterogeneous processing engine coupling a dual PowerPC™ AltiVec™ CPU with two latest generation Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. The combination of devices provides leading edge performance with flexible high-bandwidth I/O. This VXS board is available in both air-cooled and conduction cooled versions, with VxWorks or Linux board support packages. The VPF2 also supports the FusionXF FPGA Design Kit of FPGA HDL blocks for implementing the customer’s application.

At its most simple, the VPF2 is a quad processor DSP engine. Two of these processor elements are combined into a single, highly integrated, Freescale MPC8641D CPU. The other two processors are the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA devices. It is this hybrid CPU/FPGA combination that makes the VPF2 so powerful through levering the advantages of each technology. The FPGAs also provide the VXS/VITA 41 multi-gigabit serial communications. Both FPGAs are fully user programmable and VMETRO provides tools, examples and utilities to simplify code development.

Input/output is provided through a number of channels including copper or fiber Ethernet ports, XMC/PMC for a wide choice of I/O options, RS232 ports or VXS serial I/O for inter-board communications along with a VME64 bus. Direct FPGA I/O is also provided through a parallel port, via the backplane, for high bandwidth I/O.

For system critical applications, Built-In Test (BIT) provides a power up and run-time system diagnostic. To make application development easier, I/O board drivers and optimized libraries are available. The operating systems supported are VxWorks and Linux. The suite of libraries and utilities is known as FusionXF. The FusionXF FPGA design kit provides the BSP and support code for both the PowerPC processors and the Virtex-5 FPGAs. FusionXF contains both an SDK (Software Development Kit) and HDK (HDL Development Kit). This kit provides all the necessary libraries and utilities needed for using the VPF2. Different versions are available for each of the different operation systems.