VMETRO kick starts VPX system development

VPX development chassis

VMETRO, a leader in embedded computing solutions based on standards such as VXS, VPX, XMC and FMC that utilize multi-gigabit serial interconnects, today announced a five slot VPX/VXS portable tower enclosure and backplane to accelerate and simplify VPX system integration and development. A challenge of developing with VPX is there isnt a “standard” VPX backplane which will result in delays on many VPX programs while custom backplanes are developed. The VMETRO VPX/VXS portable tower directly addresses this challenge giving engineers and software developers a head start on their integration and application development. The backplanes design enables full exploitation of the massive backplane bandwidth of VMETROs FPE650 quad-FPGA and HPE640 hybrid-PowerPC/FPGA VPX boards while enabling developers to integrate VMETROs existing VXS boards into embedded real-time DSP systems.

The backplane is designed specifically to support the high speed and high bandwidth I/O and backplane interconnectivity of the VMETRO FPE650 and HPE640 VPX boards. The VPX/VXS backplane is equipped with 3 VPX slots and 2 VXS slots (1 payload and 1 switch). To support VPX/REDI boards, the VPX slots in are on a 1” pitch. The single VXS payload slot enables existing VXS payload boards to be utilized; the VXS switch slot supports the VMETRO CSW1 switch which provides up to 12 front panel fiber optic transceivers and flexible backplane connections between the VPX and VXS payload slots.

The chassis, model VPX-ENC-0102, can enclose a signal processing system controlled by a PowerPC processor running either VxWorks or Linux and up to 14 Xilinx® Virtex®-5 FPGAs and 6 high speed analog input FMC (VITA 57) modules. VMETROs FPGA development kit can be used to simplify the FPGA development and integration. The FPGA development kit provides all the building blocks to build a fully functional FPGA design to which a customer can integrate their FPGA logic and algorithms and it provides mechanisms for communication between FPGAs as well as communication between FPGAs and processors. To support the power and cooling required for such a high performance system, the VPX-ENC-0102 comes equipped with a 1332W power supply and two 190 CFM fans.