Special Feature
Figure 1
Maintenance technicians go over pre-flight inspections on their RQ-4 Global Hawk aircraft before a mission while deployed at an air base in Southwest Asia. radar, communication and other types of electronic signals. ASIP systems fly on Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4 Global Hawk (Figure 1) and Lockheed Martin’s U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. Over the last twelve months FPGA processing boards in the emerging OpenVPX architecture have represented the largest category of new FPGA solutions. In synch with that trend, Pentek offers a family of ruggedized boards for high-performance military and avionics applications utilizing the industry’s most advanced FPGA technology. Pentek’s 53xxx Cobalt board family incorporates Xilinx’s Virtex-6 FPGAs for onboard signal processing, delivering digital sampling rates to 1 GHz in a compact 3U VPX form factor. By combining processing, data conversion and preconfigured functions, the 53xxx family is suitable for such applications as UAV, CommINT (Communications Intelligence) transceivers, airborne communications recorders, airborne ra[ 12 ] COTS Journal October 2011
dar countermeasures, shipboard diversity transceivers and armored vehicle antiIED systems. All Cobalt VPX products are available with a choice of Xilinx Virtex-6 LXT or SXT FPGA devices to match the application. Other common features of Cobalt boards include PCI Express (Gen 2) interfaces up to 8 lanes wide, synchronous clocking locked to an external system reference, and an LVPECL synch bus for synchronizing multiple modules to increase channel count.
FPGA Processing Rides OpenVPX The latest version 6 of the Xilinx Virtex line is feeding the flame of FPGA processing demand. Riding that wave, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing (CWCEC) offers the CHAMP-FX3, the first rugged, high-performance FPGA OpenVPX 6U VPX board that features dual Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs. Available in both conduction-cooled and air-cooled versions, the CHAMP-FX3 provides dense
FPGA resources combined with generalpurpose processing, I/O flexibility and support for multiprocessing applications. The CHAMP-FX3 combines the dense processing resources of two large Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs (SX475T or LX550T) with a powerful AltiVec-enabled dual-core Freescale Power Architecture MPC8640D processor on a rugged 6U OpenVPX-compatible (VITA 65) form factor module. The CHAMP-FX3 complements this processing capability with a rich assortment of rear-panel I/O and memories, including a Serial RapidIO (SRIO)-based switching fabric, 16 high-speed serial links per FPGA, and 20 pairs of LVDS links to the backplane that can be used to support high-speed parallel interfaces such as Camera Link.
FPGA Solution Targets IED Defeat Electronics to defeat IEDs are extremely important in today’s conflicts. IEDs represent the largest cause of ca-