Since the days of VME on P1 and P2, Mercury Computer Systems has sought faster ways of moving data around VME systems. And as the creator of the RACE interboard I/O scheme, it’s not surprising that Mercury also initiated OpenVPX. Relying on a multiplane, interoperable approach, Mercury’s Ensemble 6000 Series of SBCs and sensor processors is targeted at Electronic Warfare (EW) and ISR applications. The SBC6521 of the series uses a 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 800 MHz FSB and acts as subsystem host for an OpenVPX architecture. High-density processing with high memory bandwidth are the SBC’s hallmarks.
Memory is 2 GB with ECC, plus 4 GB of NAND flash. There are two GbE ports: one routed to P4 and the control plane and a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port routed to the front panel or backplane. There are 2 PMC-X/XMC sites with PCI-X up to 133 MHz, 1x RS-232/422, 3 USB, 2x SATA, and 8x GPIO to the backplane. Since this is OpenVPX, IPMI-A and -B links are on the P0 management plane, Ethernet on the control plane, 4x PCIe to P1 on the data plane, and dual x8 PCIe to the P2 expansion plane. Operating temp is -40 °C to +85 °C in air-cooled versions, and -40 °C to +71 °C in conduction-cooled versions. The SBC6521 complements Mercury’s GSC6200 GPGPU-based number-cruncher in Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (PED) applications.
