CommAgility upgrades AMC for 4G and LTE with latest Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA
The AMC-V7-2C6670 provides a high density XC7VX415T-2 Virtex-7 FPGA as standard, with other FPGA options available on request. It includes Serial RapidIO (SRIO), Gigabit Ethernet and PCI Express to give maximum I/O flexibility.
Edward Young, managing director at CommAgility, said, “With the Virtex-7, Xilinx has delivered the DSP performance and I/O bandwidth that’s required for high performance wireless baseband processing – while simultaneously reducing power consumption.”
An IDT CPS-1848 Gen2 SRIO switch provides flexible, high-bandwidth off-board communications, and supports Serial RapidIO at up to 25 Gbaud per port. Flexible high-speed optical links, suitable for a range of applications, are provided by three front panel SFP+ optical interfaces at up to 10.3 Gbaud, which link to the FPGA or DSPs.
A Gigabit Ethernet interface uses on-board switches for maximum flexibility and access to all main devices on the module. Two fast 10Gbaud PCI Express links are provided to connect the FPGA with each of the two DSPs. For applications that require timing and synchronisation, this is achieved via the front panel or backplane clock I/O, or an optional GPS receiver.
The AMC also includes two TMS320C6670 fixed- and floating-point quad core DSPs from Texas Instruments, based on their KeyStone multicore architecture. With 8 DSP cores running at 1.2 GHz and shared memory, the module delivers high DSP performance to meet the demands of wireless applications.
The module includes up to 2 Gbyte of 64-bit wide DDR3-1600 SDRAM for each DSP. The FPGA has two banks of DDR3 SDRAM: 1 Gbyte of 32-bit wide and 512 Mbytes of 16-bit wide memory. 256 Mbytes of Flash memory is also provided for non-volatile storage of multiple FPGA configurations and DSP and FPGA software. CommAgility glue logic provides board control and FPGA configuration via local SPI interfaces or over SRIO, leaving the main FPGA completely free for customer application code. Full Board Support Libraries are also provided to speed customer application development.
Available software includes a full MicroBlaze board support library for the FPGA, and full board support libraries for the DSPs. Additional debug support is provided via on-board serial port connectors, plus RS-232 and JTAG debug via the CommAgility AMC-BB Debug Breakout Board.
The module is a compact full-size, single width PICMG AMC.0 R2.0 AMC, and is suitable for use in both ATCA carriers and MicroTCA chassis. It can also operate standalone, with suitable power and cooling. A range of build options is available, and further customisation is possible in volume, to enable the best technical and commercial fit to a customer application to be achieved.