Complex real-time signal processing applications deployed in a harsh environment impose a challenging set of system design requirements when used in applications like electronic countermeasures or wideband surveillance. These types of applications have significant processing requirements coupled with the need to move data quickly and efficiently through the system. Typical systems usually include large FPGAs for filtering incoming data and high performance general purpose processors like PowerPCs for manipulating this filtered data. To eliminate I/O bottlenecks, there needs to be an efficient method for passing large amounts of this data between onboard resources and neighboring cards in the sub-system. As many of these applications are used in-flight, this needs to be accomplished in a small footprint and sometimes in an environment with extended temperatures, shock and vibration challenges. VMETRO's Phoenix VXS based systems were designed to be used in such environments and can be employed to meet these design challenges.
The Phoenix VPF1 VXS processing card is at the heart of the Phoenix VXS system strategy. Utilized for initial processing of captured data and then initial decision making, this card consists of two Xilinx Virtex II Pro P70 FPGAs, two 1 GHz floating point Freescale PowerPC 7447As, and real-time, non-deterministic point-to-point interconnects between the local FPGAs and off-board via VXS. This balance of FPGA, PowerPC and communications is achieved by exploiting the interconnectivity provided by the multi-gigabit transceivers, sometimes referred to as RocketIOs, which are built into the onboard FPGAs. Four of these RocketIOs connect the two FPGAs, with an additional four from each FPGA routed to the VXS connector in the P0 area of the Phoenix VPF1. All resources on the Phoenix VPF1 can then be exploited as needed by the design engineer and tailored to their particular application.
With traditional systems, such processing power in a single card enables engineers to develop algorithms that address applications which can run on it before inherent limitations with compute power or communications bandwidth are encountered. Once additional resources are required, system architecting becomes quite difficult as standard parallel buses or custom hardwired backplanes are needed to scale the system. The Phoenix CSW1 switch card solves this problem by coupling an industry standard VXS backplane to RocketIOs between multiple Phoenix VPF1s in the same chassis, or even remote systems via fiber optic front panel I/O. Reconfigurable on boot up, the Phoenix CSW1 is a semi-static switch which is protocol agnostic. Not only does it support lightweight interconnection schemes like Aurora or sFPDP, but because the Phoenix CSW1 simply routes signals, it could support higher level protocols like serial RapidIO or PCI Express. Coupling Phoenix VPF1s with Phoenix CSW1s therefore enables design engineers to quickly develop and experiment with reconfigurable, scalable and balanced applications across multiple boards without having to design expensive backplanes.
Having a unified and consistent way of establishing inter-node communications becomes necessary when constructing such large systems. VMETRO has developed TransComm specifically for this purpose. TransComm is a suite of libraries for interfacing between onboard PowerPCs and Xilinx FPGAs, interfacing between the FPGAs onboard or communicating between FPGAs on remote boards.
Adopters of Phoenix VXS technology include the ALMDS program at Northrop Grumman. ALMDS, or Airborne Laser Mine Detection System, will be deploying Phoenix VXS based technology in their next generation mine hunting systems.
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