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| FALCON high speed VITA77 data recorder |
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| Diagram of the FALCON architecture |
Sunnyvale, CA— February 19, 2012 —PCI-SYSTEMS Inc., a leading supplier of conduction cooled VPX systems, has been awarded by a prime contractor to deliver the fastest available FALCON (VITA77) high speed 14 slot VPX recorder with 6 GB sustained data rate and 32Terrabyte Raid SSD storage.
Based on the forced air cooled FALCON series, the system uses a PCIe Gen3 bus structure with 16 lanes uplink and 8/16 lanes for each peripheral slot. Two Virtex7 based data acquisition boards with options from 16 bit 400MS/sec to 10 bit 5Gs/sec frontends, transfer data to its own Raid SSD boards with 3GB/sec by direct transfer without intervention of the CPU board, boosting a total of 6GB/s data transfer rate.
“High speed data transfers on PCIe Gen 3 switch fabric in a STAR configuration offer the lowest latency by tightly coupling all PCIe devices to a common 100MHz reference clock,” states Claus Gross, President of PCI Systems Inc.,”it allows SSC in data acquisition, and our FPGA boards can handle their own PCIe clock direction when dumping data fast into our x8 lanes RAID SSD boards. The forced air cooled FALCON chassis is the smallest and fastest VPX VITA77 system currently on the market.”
The high speed FALCON data acquisition system features:
• 14 slots 3U VPX (VITA77) plus Power supply slot
• 32TB RAID SSD storage
• Modular Backplane, STAR configuration, bus analyzer integrated
• PCIe Gen 3 “noStub” routing
• GPS integrated
• 1Hz GPS clock available on each backplane slot
• Temperature and Humidity sensor integrated
• 3 axis shock sensor and chassis management FPGA integrated
• 8/16 lanes per slot PCIe Gen3
The chassis is a new development, based on VITA 77 ( VPX for instrumentation) COTS and can be used for multiple applications by changing the switch mezzanine to customer needs.
PCIe Gen 3 “noStub” routing is used throughout the system to maximize data throughput.
.Also it is possible to use a Gb Ethernet switch and a serial Rapid I/O switch on this mezzanine, if needed.
On the mezzanine card, a 3 axis shock sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor and a GPS module are integrated and the values can be read over a I2C bus which is connected to all applicable slots as per VITA specification.
PCI-SYSTEMS Inc. develops and manufactures intelligent VPX Systems, cPCI, CPU and peripheral boards as well as advanced mechanical design solutions in the US and Germany for many platforms that provide precision control of robotic and automated equipment in the semiconductor, medical and industrial equipment markets as well as for ruggedized embedded OEM applications in airborne and defense applications.