The Cobalt board family from Pentek is now available for use in cPCI (CompactPCI) systems. The company claims that the migration to cPCI gives system designers full access to the company's advanced modular technology, which features signal acquisition and processing power of Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs.
The board family comprises the xx630, xx650, xx620, xx621, xx660, xx661, and xx690 modules. The xx630 comprises a 1GHz ADC and DAC whereas the xx650 has a two-channel 500MHz ADC and two-channel 800MHz DAC. The xx660 board features a four-channel 200MHz 16bit ADC and the xx661 features the four-channel 200MHz ADC. The xx690 has a L-band RF tuner with a two-channel 200MHz ADC.
All boards have dedicated direct memory access channels and memory buffers for each I/O stream, and multi-channel, multi-board synchronisation along with a customisable Virtex-6 FPGA for on-board signal processing. They are available as 3U cPCI carriers that contain one XMC (XDR memory controller) module; 6U cPCI carriers with one XMC installed; and 6U cPCI carriers that contain two identical XMC modules.
A bridge chip handles mapping of the board's serial PCIe interface to the parallel PCI bus. The company claims that developers can utilise the FPGAs for on-board signal processing that can help reduce data transfer rates across the backplane.
