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| Model 4207 |
UPPER SADDLE RIVER, NJ–June 30, 2009–Pentek, Inc., one of the pioneers of VME board-level technology, today released Wind River’s VxWorks operating system support for its Model 4207, the company’s flagship processor board for high-performance I/O and data acquisition systems. Coupling the leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded systems to this PowerPC and FPGA platform stems from its target applications and wide market acceptance.
The new VxWorks Board Support Package (BSP) provides software developers with a complete library of hardware-initialization, control and application functions fully compatible with Wind River’s Workbench development environment.
“VxWorks adds low-latency and deterministic real-time control of the many hardware resources and interfaces available on the Model 4207,” said Rodger Hosking, vice president, Pentek. “Engineers familiar with this proven and highly-effective operating system and Tornado development tools can boost productivity to speed application development,” he added.
The Model 4207 is uniquely designed for connectivity. The fabric-transparent, zero-latency crossbar switch connects the PowerPC, XMC module sites, the VXS connector, front-panel optical transceivers, Fibre Channel controller, and FPGA ports together using high-speed gigabit serial data paths.
Marc Ruocco, Pentek product manager explained, “The switch simply passes the gigabit serial traffic from one port to another, totally independent of any particular protocol. Multiple data streams can be sent through the switch simultaneously, even if they have different protocols. For example, the two front-panel optical ports can be connected to the Fibre Channel controller to support an 800 MB/sec VxWorks file system on an attached disk array.”
The Model 4207 brings to designers extraordinary power, speed and connectivity in a single-slot solution, making it well suited for wideband, data acquisition and recording, real-time digital signal processing and software radio applications.
Powerful Processing
The Model 4207 is equipped with either a single-core MPC8641 or a dual-core MPC8641D executing at a maximum frequency of 1.5 GHz. These AltiVec Freescale PowerPC processors perform 128-bit parallel processing and deliver DSP floating-point processing rates of up to 12,000 GFLOPS. The processor includes built-in gigabit serial fabric support for 4x Serial RapidIO.
User-Programmable FPGA and Aurora Engine
The Model 4207 includes an optional on-board Xilinx Virtex-4 FX Series FPGA, the XC4VFX60 or XC4VFX100. Two 4X RocketIO ports provide high-speed serial paths between the FPGA and the crossbar switch for connection to other parts of the board, including the processor, VXS interface and XMC sites. A built-in Xilinx Aurora protocol engine, DMA controller and PCI-X interface simplify data transfers to and from the FPGA and two 256 MB banks of DDR2 SDRAM attached to the FPGA.
Developers can take advantage of unused FPGA resources to implement custom signal-processing algorithms with Pentek’s GateFlow FPGA Design Kit. The kit includes VHDL source files and works in conjunction with the Xilinx ISE Foundation design tools.
Compatible Hardware Products and Development Tools for a Variety of Platforms
The 4207 is compatible with any Pentek, COTS VME, VXS, PMC or XMC module–all fully supported with compatible VxWorks drivers.
Price and Availability
Pentek Model 4996A-207 VxWorks Board Support Package for Model 4207 is available immediately with prices starting at $3,000 USD. The Pentek Model 4207 pricing starts at $14,725 USD with delivery 10 to 12 weeks ARO.
About Pentek
Pentek, Inc. manufactures and markets innovative embedded systems and boards to design engineers and is a certified ISO 9001:2000 quality management company. Pentek offers powerful VME, VXS, PMC, XMC, cPCI, PCI and PCIe boards and systems for data acquisition, software radio and digital signal processing featuring Texas Instruments DSPs, Freescale PowerPCs and Xilinx FPGAs. Pentek’s I/O includes A/Ds, D/As, FPGAs, digital transceivers, installed IP cores and more. The company offers strong DSP software support and equips all products with high-performance I/O including gigabit serial interfaces.