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| ADC510 Dual Channel 500 MSPS 12-bit ADC FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) |
VMETRO today announced the industry’s first FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC/VITA 57) module. The ADC510, available in air-cooled and conduction-cooled rugged versions, integrates two 12-bit 500MHz A/D chips for use in DSP applications such as Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), Electronic Counter Measures (ECM), and Radar. This innovative design, based on the emerging VITA 57.1 standard, makes it easier for developers to integrate FPGAs into their embedded system designs.
The ADC510 supports two Texas Instruments ADS5463 ADC devices with each device supporting a sampling rate up to 500 MSPS and providing 12-bits of digital output. The ADC device interfaces are routed to the FMC connector to enable an FPGA on a baseboard to directly control and receive data. There is a choice of sample clock sources for the ADC510 including an onboard source that supports sampling rates of 300, 320, 400, and 500 MSPS as well as the ability to utilize an external sample clock. Input and output triggers are provided to enable multiple ADC510 modules to be synchronized to increase the number of input channels.
“The introduction of the first FMC module marks a new generation in I/O aimed at FPGAs – developers continue to benefit from high-bandwidth, low-latency coupling between an FPGA and I/O with a new level of industry standard flexibility,” comments Thomas Nygaard, Chief Technology Officer of VMETRO. “FMC modules such as the ADC510 can be integrated with baseboards such as VMETROs FPE650 (a 6U VPX board with four Xilinx® Virtex®-5 FPGAs and two FMC sites) to create very powerful solutions.”
FMCs address the needs of FPGA centric I/O by enabling I/O devices that reside on an industry standard mezzanine card to be attached to, and directly controlled by, FPGAs that reside on a baseboard. The benefits of FMCs are a small footprint, reduced I/O bottlenecks, increased flexibility, and reduced cost by removing redundant interfaces. An FMC module is about half the size of a PMC mezzanine module. To maximize data throughput and minimize latency, the FMC connector has many pins that support high-speed signals for moving data between the FMC and an FPGA on the baseboard. FMCs are ideal for high speed analog I/O, digital I/O, fiber-optics, memory or even a DSP co-processor.
“The emerging FMC standard will reduce design costs and time-to-market by bringing the benefits of modular design much closer to the FPGA user community,” states Raj Seelam, DSP Solutions Product Manager at Xilinx. “The combination of high-speed I/O FMC modules, such as VMETROs ADC510, and our latest Virtex-5 SXT FPGA technology is very compelling for a variety of DSP applications.”
VMETRO makes available HDL example code for the ADC510 for integration into the HDL development suite for VMETRO FPGA baseboards.