New Family of High Performance Data Acquisition Artix-7 FPGA XMC modules
ISI LLC have released the first board in a new family of high performance data acquisition modules that is centred around the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. These devices provide the highest performance-per-watt fabric, transceiver line rates, DSP processing, and Analogue Mixed Signal integration in a cost-optimized FPGA. The family is the best value for a variety of cost- and power-sensitive applications including software-defined radio, machine vision cameras, and low-end wireless backhaul. On top of that, the Vivado toolset is free to use on the Artix-7 family, including the largest device, the A700T2 which is used on the new XA family.
Each XA module has:
- Artix®-7A200T2 with 33,650 slices, >13Mb of block ram and 740 DSP slices.
- 1GB of DDR3 memory attached to the FPGA for use as virtual FIFO’s between the analogue front end and the 4 lane Gen2 PCIe interface.
- A PLL and reference oscillator to provide the analogue front end with a high stability clock.
- Four lanes of Aurora links for communication with other XA modules.
- Flash memory for logic configuration storage.
The XA family have analogue front ends with typically a couple of channels of >100MSPS Adc or Dac or both.
Innovative’s XMC modules can be used in a variety of hosts using their adapters and standalone hosts. This includes:
- Desktop PC’s – PCI adapter, PCIe x1 adapter, PCIe x8 adapter.
- 3U chassis – cPCI adapter, PXIe adapter.
- VPX – VPX adapter.
- Standalone PC’s – ePC-nano, ePC-Duo.
All modules come complete with software drivers and examples for Windows and Linux operating systems. The libraries and example apps are written in C++ and are supplied with sourcecode. Drivers for using the boards in LabVIEW and Matlab are also available. Customers who wish to customise the logic in the FPGA need to purchase the Framework Logic library.
The XA family will replace the X3 family which was released in 2007 around the Spartan3A DSP.
