All good things come to those who wait. Or so it might be in the realm of rugged, deployable DSP boards. When Curtiss-Wright announced their conduction-cooled CHAMP-FX board, we were surprised that they didn’t have such a version all along. We were told that the company wanted to wait until they were actually shipping the product in volume to real customers. There you have it: This board is for real.
Based upon the popular CHAMP 6U VME64x and VXS sized boards, the dual Xilinx Virtex-II Pro-based engine and CHAMPtools-FX Design Kit is intended for applications running -40 °C to +85 °C in IEEE 1101.2 mechanical chassis. Contained in each FPGA are two IBM PowerPC 405 RISC CPUs supported by a total of 512 MB DDR266 SDRAM and 16 MB DDR II fast SRAM. The FPGAs also support four 4-bit, bidirectional RocketIP ports for interboard connectivity, plus two off-board StarFabric interfaces for serial interconnects. There are dual PMC/XMC sites, debug interfaces for ease-of-use, and VHDL IP libraries optimized for wide temperature range circuits (to mitigate race conditions and low-temp PLL problems).
