BittWare has released SP/S4-AMC (SP/S4AM), a new member of the "S4" family of board-level signal processing solutions, which leverage Altera's Stratix IV family of FPGAs. This AdvancedMC (Advanced Mezzanine Card) uses the Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA to provide performance and flexibility, while four SFP/SFP+ (small form-factor pluggable-plus) transceivers enable support of any serial communication standard, including Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, SONET, CPRI and OBSAI. The four SFP/SFP+ SerDes channels are connected directly to the on-board Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA, which handles higher level communications protocols. The board-level signal processing solution is suitable for customers with extreme bandwidth requirements.
Based on Altera's Stratix IV GX FPGA, the board-level signal processing solution is a full-size, single width AdvancedMC that can be attached to AdvancedTCA (Advanced Telecom Compute Architecture) carriers or other cards equipped with AMC bays, and used in MicroTCA systems. It features a high-density, low-power Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA designed for serial I/O-based applications, creating a flexible, reconfigurable AMC. A four-cage SFP/SFP+ connector, implemented on a VITA 57 (FMC) card, is available on the front panel with each transceiver providing support for various serial communication standards, including fibre channel, Gigabit Ethernet, SONET, CPRI, and OBSAI. The board also provides an IPMI system management interface, a configurable 15 port AMC SerDes interface supporting a variety of protocols. Additionally, the board features 10/100 Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, two banks of DDR3 SDRAM, two banks of QDRII+ SRAM, and flash memory for booting the FPGAs and FINe.
BittWare's AFW (Atlantis FrameWork) provides the Stratix IV GX FPGA on the board with fully validated board-level physical interfaces for I/O, communications, and memory, along with DMA engines and resource arbitration. AFW frees users of the board from reinventing low-level IP for the FPGA, and allows them to focus on the development of their application's processing and I/O requirements.
BittWare's FINe Bridge implements a host/control bridge for the board with software support, removing that complexity from the data plane, I/O, and processing implemented on the Stratix IV GX FPGA.
