VMETRO building VPX momentum

In December 2007, VMETRO continued to build momentum in its VPX (VITA 46) product line by shipping two new products, the MM-1200, an intelligent 6U XMC/PMC carrier, and VCX301, a 3U XMC carrier, to customers. These shipments demonstrate VMETROs commitment to provide innovative embedded computing solutions using high-speed serial interconnects including VXS (VITA 41) and VPX (VITA 46) for use in development and deployed systems. The MM-1200 and VCX301 are suited for use in deployed signal processing systems such as electronic warfare (EW) and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) applications.

Based on the 6U VPX form factor, the MM-1200 is an Intelligent XMC/PMC Carrier. This board enables onboard devices including the XMC/PMC sites, large SDRAM memories and the onboard CoSine System-on-Chip to directly interface with a Serial RapidIO based fabric. The CoSine System-on-Chip are fully functional computers with dual embedded PowerPC 405GPs for a total of 4 embedded PowerPC processors. The MM-1200 design was based on VMETROs existing VPX board, the MM-1600, which has two additional large Xilinx® VirtexTM-4 FPGAs.

For 3U VPX, the VCX301 XMC carrier routes data up to 5GB/s to the VPX backplane. The VCX301 supports 2 x4 full duplex links from the XMC P15 to VPX P1 connectors and 4 x4 full duplex links from the XMC P16 to VPX P2 connectors. The VCX301 also routes eight full duplex differential pairs and eight single-ended signals from the PMC P14 to the VPX P2 connector. For 3U VPX development programs, the VCX301 provides a convenient way to integrate existing XMC modules into the system.

Both products are available as air or conduction-cooled rugged versions.