DSP, ARM, and FPGA all on one board! The VPX-D16A4-PCIE from CommAgility is a rugged, high-performance DSP- and FPGA-based module in the 3U OpenVPX form factor. The module is ideal for electronic warfare (EW), software radio, imaging, or radar applications that require very high signal processing performance in the robust VPX form factor for deployment in harsh environments.
The VPX-D16A4-PCIE is based on a Texas Instruments (TI) TCI6638K2K KeyStone-based system-on-chip (SoC) and a TMS320C6678 SoC, which between the two chips contain 16 C66x DSP cores and four ARM Cortex-A15 cores, as well as baseband and networking accelerators. The two SoCs are closely coupled with TI’s HyperLink bus as well as Gigabit Ethernet. Each device has its own 2 GB DDR3 memory bank. The VPX-D16A4-PCIE includes a 10 Gbaud 2x PCI Express interface to the VPX backplane for each of the two onboard SoCs.
For additional I/O or coprocessing, the main DSP is connected via PCI Express and the AIF2 CPRI interface to a Xilinx Kintex-7 K325T FPGA, which also has Gigabit Ethernet and its own backplane MGT connections. The FPGA has multiple LVDS, GPIO, and serial connections to the P2 connector to enable interfacing to an RTM with specialized I/O such as multichannel RF or high-speed ADC/DAC interfaces.