Pentek has introduced 14 products in its family of 3U VPX boards for data acquisition, software radio and digital signal processing. These boards offer flexible backplane fabric connections supporting maximum data rates of up to 4Gbyte/s with PCIe (PCI Express) Gen 2 (Generation 2) and 2.5Gbyte/s with other protocols. Each module features a PCIe Gen 2 interface, which includes a bridge that provides PCIe lane-width negotiation for one, four, eight or 16 data transfers over the VPX backplane. All modules feature a fabric-transparent crossbar switch that delivers many benefits. It allows flexible assignment of the PCIe interface lanes to backplane connector pins. So system integrators can easily match a diverse range of backplane topologies. The switch supports other gigabit serial protocols for moving data, such as Xilinx Aurora and Serial Rapid I/O. The switch simply passes the gigabit serial traffic from one port to another, totally independent of any particular protocol. Multiple data streams can be sent through the switch simultaneously. The switch also allows all modules to act as a VPX switch, to manage serial fabric connections to and from other modules across the backplane.
