Kane Computing reported the availability of a new prototyping platform that enables developers to combine D.Module DSP and FPGA boards with Ansi Vita S7 compliant FMC modules. The D2-Base-FMC from D.SignT is a prototyping and evaluation platform for the D.Module2 family of DSP and FPGA boards. An Ansi Vita 57 compliant FMC LPC IO site allows it to be used with industry-standard mezzanine boards (A/D and D/A data acquisition, Video and Camera interfaces, Digital Radio frontends etc.). The Eurocard size platform supports various communication interfaces which are accessible on the front panel: 1-lane PCIe, High-Speed USB2.0, and Ethernet (100Base-Tx or 1000-Base-T). Also provided is an RS232 port and additional FPGA and DSP I/O signals, which are accessible on a patch area below the D.Module2 site. The D.Module2 standard allows stacking of modules so both an FPGA and a DSP module can be used for processing data for the same application.
New algorithms and applications are hungry for I/O and memory bandwidth and often require DSP-FPGA co-operation. The D.Module2 DSP board generation addresses these needs with a significantly increased pin count to take the additional DSP peripherals and I/O channels accessible. The bus interface now supports asynchronous and synchronous operation with 500 Mbyte/s bandwidth, ideally suited to exchange data with FPGAs. Additional high-speed communication peripherals are available on the D.Module2: a 3 Mbit/s dual-channel UART and a USB 2.0 peripheral controller.
Available D.Module2 boards include a 720MHz TMS320DM642 fixed-point DSP board, a 300MHz TMS320C6747 floating-point DSP board, a 500MHz ADSP-TS203 TigerSHARC floating-point board and a 2-channel, 8 MSPS, 12-bit AD/DA converter daughter card. The latest product the D.Module2.6SLX45T includes a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA, to provide high speed data preprocessing and connectivity for D.Module2 DSP boards. The Spartan 6LXT FPGA family is perfectly suited for high-speed serial communication: four Gigabit Transceiver Ports are available for PCI/e, SATA, SGMII, or SRIO links, or used as high speed data converter interfaces using the JESD204(A) standard. One Gigabit transceiver is routed to the DSP (top-side) connector, three are available on the bottom side connector. The split D.Module2 bus interface on top and bottom-side connectors allows the FPGA to be inserted board between the DSP and a data acquisition board.
