FPGA board for high-performance data acquisition and signal processing introduced by Pentek for radar and communications applications

UPPER SADDLE RIVER, N.J., 15 June 2010. Pentek Inc. in Upper Saddle River, N.J., is introducing the 71660 four-channel embedded computing module for data acquisition and digital signal processing (DSP) in radar and communications applications. The Pentek 71660 is a member of the company's Cobalt product family, based on Xilinx Virtex-6 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and is a follow-on to Pentek's Virtex-5 FPGA 7150 board family.

The four 200-megasample-per-second, 16-bit data acquisition channels of the 71660 deliver nearly 90 dB of spurious-free dynamic range, which enables users to detect small signals of interest surrounded by large interferers, Pentek officials say. The embedded computer for digital signal processing has a back-end PCI Express interface.

Four independent memory banks provide as much as 2 gigabytes of DDR3 SDRAM for applications requiring deep memory, or as much as 32 megabytes of QDRII+ SRAM for applications requiring fast random access. The board is available in XMC, PCI Express, 3U VPX, 3U CompactPCI, and 6U CompactPCI form factors.

The data acquisition channels operate from a common clock that can come from an external source or an on-board, programmable, crystal-controlled oscillator. An external clock can drive the analog-to-digital converters directly as a sample clock or be used as a phase-lock reference for the internal oscillator. The 71660 also uses two sync and two gate/trigger signals for synchronizing data acquisition channels across several modules.

The memory also can be configured to offer two banks of DDR3 SDRAM or QDRII+ SRAM to provide the flexibility to accommodate complex applications. Built-in functions of the memory controller include multi-channel ADC data capture, data streaming, and tagging of data streams with metadata packets that include channel ID, sample count and time stamp information.

The Virtex-6 FPGA on the 71660 provides a combination of turnkey and custom functionality, as users may select the specific FPGA device installed, ranging from the lower-cost LX130T to the high-performance SX475T with up to 2016 DSP slices. Software support initially includes drivers for Windows and Linux platforms, with support for VxWorks to follow.

The board ships with the FPGA configured to provide synchronization, triggering, multiplexing, and data acquisition has including a complete radar range gate engine. Users can immediately take full advantage of these advanced 71660 has with no additional FPGA programming. In even with the smallest member of the Virtex-6 family, these built-in functions occupy no more than 40 percent of the FPGA's resources, providing users with ample opportunity to add their own IP.

For more information contact Pentek online at www.pentek.com.