Chelmsford MA – December 18, 2006, 2006 – TEK Microsystems, Inc. of Chelmsford MA today announced that it has received an initial order of $225k from Harris Corporation of Melbourne, FL. The Tekmicro-designed application specific system will receive broadband sampled data at 1.6 G samples/sec and store it in 12 RAID arrays. The VXS system is configured with a single Neptune 2 A/D board and one Callisto board providing exceptionally high performance data storage capability. This results in a smaller, less expensive, less power-hungry system than has been available previously.
The Tekmicro system uses the A/D capabilities of the Neptune 2 to receive the sampled data which is then sent to the Callisto VXS switch card. Callisto includes five FPGAs and 12 front panel fiber ports. In this application, the FPGAs are programmed to each include two FibreChannel cores that take advantage of the PowerPC 405 processors in the Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA. The data is then streamed out through Callisto’s 12 FiberChannel ports to 12 RAID disk arrays for storage.
“Tekmicro’s advanced VXS products continue to be well received by our military market target accounts,” comments Paul Martino, vice president of sales, marketing and customer support. “This win from Harris continues to fuel growth and product development at Tekmicro. Our UK-based development team is working on extending and enhancing our current VXS products and we are confident that this growth will continue into 2007.”
Tekmicro’s Callisto VXS-1 platform is a very powerful card in a VXS system. It has five Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs on the VXS switch card. The FPGAs can be programmed with a fabric protocol core, or the signal processing core, or both, if/when appropriate for the application.
Callisto supports up to 12 links of 2.5 Gbits/s each on the front panel to other system components (e.g. sensor front ends) which may be located remotely, or to provide a bridge to separate chassis (e.g. legacy processing racks). The front panel links are implemented using Small Form Pluggable (SFP) modules that can be populated with fiber optic or copper transceivers to support a wide range of protocols such as Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Infiniband or Serial FPDP. Using the front panels connection for I/O, Callisto can also act as a standalone FPGA sensor processing resource or co-processing resource if other VXS cards are not required.
Tekmicro’s Neptune 2 VXS, combines FPGA technology with a dual channel, 2.2 GSPS (giga samples per second) architecture. Neptune 2 is a 6U VME / VXS payload card for high-speed streaming analog-to-digital applications, combining an ultra high sample rate with up to 10-bit resolution and multi-channel synchronization to single sample resolution, an improvement of 16x over existing technologies. With Neptune 2 developers can build high performance embedded systems without sacrificing open standard interoperability.
About TEK Microsystems, Inc.
Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, TEK Microsystems, Inc., designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of advanced high-performance boards and systems for embedded real-time data acquisition, data conversion, storage and recording. The Company provides both commercial and rugged grade products which are used in real-time systems designed for applications such as reconnaissance, electronic warfare, signals intelligence, mine detection, medical imaging, radar, sonar, semiconductor inspection and seismic research. For additional information see www.tekmicro.com.