The new ICS-8500 is the first PMC to become available that delivers the leading edge performance of FPDP II – with its transfer rate of 400 MBytes/second, compared with 160 MBytes/second for FPDP – in a rugged air- or conduction-cooled format.
The FPDP (Front Panel Data Port) interface was developed by ICS in 1994 as a cost-effective method of providing high-speed communication between two boards, providing sustained high bandwidth, deterministic throughput that is not impeded by contention for bus resources and that does not affect the performance of the bus for other system functions. FPDP is now an ANSI/VITA standard (ANSI/VITA 17-1998) and is widely accepted throughout the industry as the optimum method of achieving high-speed data transfer between sensors and DSPs.
The ICS-8500 – configurable as either a transmitter or a receiver – also features 8 MBytes of swing buffer memory, setting it apart from products that provide only limited FIFO capability. It is available in five levels of ruggedization including the capability for operation over a temperature range of -40 to +85 degrees Celsius.
Offering similar functionality to the popular ICS-500-R and ICS-500-T PMC products, but configurable under software control as either a receiver or transmitter, the ICS-8500 has no front panel connector: the 400 MBytes/second FPDP II interface is provided via the PMC P4 connector. When the ICS-8500 is communicating with a non-FPDP II device, it automatically reverts to ANSI/VITA 17 FPDP operation at up to 160 MBytes/second. The ICS-8500 features a PCI 2.2 (64/66) PCI interface.
In transmit mode, the board provides an FPDP/TM interface. In addition to a continuous data transmit capability, a Loop mode of operation is available, in which a fixed length of data equal to the programmed buffer length is written to both banks of the swing buffer. When triggered, this data is repetitively generated and transmitted by the FPDP output interface.
In receive mode, the board provides both Receive (FPDP/R) and Receive Master (FPDP/RM) capabilities. A key feature of the product is its ability to perform the corner turning function: this software-enabled feature reorders multi-channel data from channel ordering by time to time ordering by channel.
Availability of the ICS-8500 is immediate. Device drivers for VxWorks, Linux and Windows are available.
