LONDON, UK – September 8, 2009 – BittWare, a leading supplier of high-end COTS signal processing hardware, IP, and system solutions for military/aerospace, communications, and instrumentation markets, announced today at Defence Systems & Equipment International (DSEi) 2009 the release of the GT-3U-VPX (GT3X) board. The GT3X features a large Altera® Stratix® II GX FPGA and one cluster of four ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC® processors from Analog Devices. The front panel provides high-speed SerDes, 10/100 Ethernet, and RS-232; and the extensive back panel interface supports PCI Express™, Serial RapidIO™, GigE, and 10 GigE. The GT3X can achieve simultaneous on-board and off-board data transfers at rates exceeding 2 GB/s via BittWare’s ATLANTiS™ FrameWork implemented in the Stratix II GX FPGA. The industry’s first COTS VPX (VITA 46) board based on Altera’s Stratix II GX, the GT3X provides a hybrid signal processing architecture that takes advantage of both FPGA and DSP technology creating a complete solution for applications requiring flexibility and adaptability along with high-end signal processing, all on a ruggedizable platform.
“The combination of the high-end Altera Stratix II GX FPGA with the TigerSHARC processing cluster makes this a power-house of a board. In addition, with the GT3X connecting almost all VPX signals to the Stratix II GX FPGA, it can support many of the emerging Open VPX slot profiles,” stated Ron Huizen, VP of Technology at BittWare. “The end result is a very flexible, high-speed board that can handle your toughest signal processing challenges, while also playing nice with all the other boards in your rugged VPX system.”
GT-3U-VPX Performance Features
The GT3X offers unprecedented signal processing performance capabilities for extended temperature, conduction cooled, military and defense applications in radar, electronic warfare, image processing, and signal intelligence:
* Altera Stratix II GX FPGA supported by ATLANTiS FrameWork for I/O, routing, and processing
o Up to 132,540 equivalent LEs
o 252 embedded 18×18 multipliers, 63 DSP blocks, and 6.7 Mbits of RAM
o IP available for: Serial RapidIO™, PCI Express™, GigE, 10 GigE, CPRI, and OBSAI
o 19 channels of high-speed SerDes transceivers
o Eight link ports @ up to 600 MByte/s each routed from on- board DSPs
o 32 LVDS pairs (16 Tx and 16 Rx) to rear panel
* BittWare’s FINe™ Host/Control Bridge providing control plane processing and interface
o GigE and RS-422 to rear panel
o 10/100 Ethernet and RS-232 to front panel
* One cluster of four ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC® DSPs
o 48 GOPS 16-bit fixed point, 12 GFLOPS floating point processing power
o Two link ports routed to the ATLANTiS™ FrameWork
o 24 Mbits of on-chip RAM per DSP
* 3U VPX form factor (VITA 46)
o 15 SerDes lanes (supports Serial RapidIO, PCI Express, and 10 GigE [KX4]) to Stratix II GX via P1
o 32 LVDS pairs (16 Tx and 16 Rx) to Stratix II GX via P2
o GigE and 2 RS-422 to FINe
* Up to 1 GByte of on-board DDR2 SDRAM
* 64 MBytes of flash memory for booting DSPs and FPGA
Complete Development Support
The GT3X is supported by Altera’s Quartus II FPGA tools and ADI’s Crosscore tool suite for application/code development. BittWare’s BittWorks tool suite provides everything necessary for host and embedded development and consists of:
* Host Interface Library (HIL), a full featured, mature application programming interface (API) which provides a C callable interface to BittWare boards from the host system (connected or remote) to read and write to memory, provide board and processor control, and control interrupts
* BWIO Library which provides a common interface for all supported components, easily supporting new features without API changes, and contains ATLANTiS/DSP/board component drivers, and POSIX-Based I/O (Open, Read,Write, Ioctl, Close)
* BittWare Utilities that includes access control to BittWare devices, a scan for BittWare devices on the network, access control from remote clients, automated host and DSP-based (if applicable) diagnostic tests, low-level debugging, loader for the ATLANTiS FPGA, and a graphing utility for exploring board memory
The third party tools coupled with BittWare’s BittWorks tool suite combine to make developing and debugging efforts on the GT3X easy and efficient.
Availability
BittWare will begin shipping Early Access Units to its lead customer in Q4-2009, with OEM quantities available Q1-2010.
About BittWare, Inc.
For two decades, BittWare, Inc. has been the leading designer and manufacturer of FPGA computing and hybrid (FPGA+DSP) board-level solutions based on the high-end Altera Stratix family of FPGAs and Analog Devices’ TigerSHARC® technology. The company provides the essential building blocks required by OEMs for developing and deploying their innovative systems in defense, communications, instrumentation, and life sciences applications. BittWare’s product offering addresses OEM needs from prototype-to-production and span a variety of platforms, including AMC, VXS, VME/VPX, PCI, CompactPCI, PMC and standalone. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA and DSP solutions, visit www.bittware.com.