N.A.T. presents a new member of its MicroTCA Carrier Hub family, the NAT-MCH-FPGA, which combines the fast and low latency SRIO switching with a fully-customizable Kintex-7 FPGA and SFP+ receptacles, saving 1 AMC slot. The special FPGA hub module is intended to be used for switching or multiplexing CPRI, OBSAI, standard (e.g. SRIO, XAUI) or customized serial protocols.
CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) and OBSAI (Open Base Architecture Initiative) are key internal interfaces of radio base stations between the Radio Equipment Control and the Radio Equipment. Standard protocols such as SRIO and XAUI are dedicated for applications such as Media Gateways and Test & Measurement Equipment. Moreover, this board is ideally suited for going beyond the standard MCH features by utilizing the FPGA as
- cluster provider by grouping and bundling data streams to and from AMCs and external high-performance data sources
- point-to-point data connector by high-performance serial connectivity to benefit from standard backplanes
- powerful data logging machine by adding e.g. ARM processor cores
- data stream analyser by high-density logic and advanced memory interfacing
Due to its low latency SRIO switch combined with a XILINX Kintex-7 FPGA the NAT-MCH-FPGA establishes a highly adaptable and flexible interconnect for up to 12 Advanced Mezzanine Cards in a MTCA system. Utilizing the SFP+ receptacles external signals can be easily brought to the system, be manipulated by the FPGA and then be distributed to the AMCs. LTE and WiMax applications and others such as Software Defined Radio could benefit i.e. by directly providing antenna signals to a farm of high performance DSP AMCs. Other applications like test and measurement equipment requiring at the same time both a manipulation of the data stream and low latency switching will benefit from the unique design of the NAT-MCH-FPGA, i.e. by reducing the slot count and thus saving costs or releasing slots for additional functionality.
