FASTX1703 PCI-EXPRESS BOARD

The FastX1703 framegrabber series is for users who anticipate a demand for extreme I/O requirements and/or higher bandwidth, complex image processing and real-time high-speed storage in a cost effective platform. The base FastX1703, is a two thirds length raw form factor PCI board six basic 85 MHz Camera Link Channels or an extended Camera Link camera interface. An auxilliary I/O connector provides a header for adaptation of other high speed interfaces such as LVDS or high speed analog formats such as UXGA or DVI. The front-end data is formatted and preprocessed by a FPGA before being sent to the memory subsection, up to four PNX1702 500 MHz processors with 256MB memory each. Finally, the FastX1703 interfaces to the host computer through a 4xPCIe interface for state-of-the-art data acquisition.

 

PNX1703 PROCESSOR

Click here for the PNX 1702 datasheet

FASTX1703 KEY SERIES FEATURES

• Raw PCI form factor board with 512MB dedicated high speed DD2RAM for the front end Virtex 5 FPGA for sustained real-time on-board storage and processing
• One to four PNX1702 500 MHz processors standard with 200/400MBytes/sec per channel actual transfer VI/VO
• Raw PCI form factor board with 512MB dedicated high speed DD2RAM for the front end Virtex 5 FPGA for sustained real-time on-board storage and processing
• Collects data from up to six asynchronous Camera (channel) Link channels
• Programmable FPGA for I/O interface configuration and processing
• Four lane PCIe bus interface
• Optional high speed I/O interface for alternative input formats, including analog,
• LVDS, UXGA and mixed inputs. Contact factory for options
• All connectors are legacy so seamless hardware integration into current environment
• Supported by industry standard firmware development tools, including fully optimized basic data manipulation, data formatting and image processing routines
• Drivers for Windows™ XP/2K, Linux and Solaris™

 

FastChannel

Alacron's FastChannel is a mechanism for the FastSeries components to communicate with the processing environment without impacting the PCI bus. Alacron has recognized the need for a non-bussed form of data transfer within any high performance DSP or Imaging application. Bussed communication schemes are subject to bus saturation and contention, limiting their usefulness. The ideal interconnection scheme is to allow point to point communication from a data source to one or more data sinks. Each interconnection supports its data transfer and is isolated from any other data transfer, preventing bus saturation and contention.
FastChannel is Alacron's implementation of a point to point or point to many points connection between a data source and its sinks. FastChannel is available on Alacron's FastImage product and supports connections between the FastImage's internal resources - on the P4 connector of the PMC locations and on two ribbon cable connections for interboard communication.

In addition to its support for the one to many data transfers, FastChannel is configurable at startup. During operation the interconnections are static. Alacron has found that the need for an interconnection between a data source and sink is not dynamic in real-time and in high performance data processing applications - especially when the data rates are high. This fact allows for a significantly lower cost interconnect solution, and at the same time a simplification in software. No special hardware is required for source and destination addresses, arbitration, and control of the channel. Very simple software protocols can be implemented as the only operation allowed is the transfer of one 'word' of data.

The FastChannel is made up of three things, a parallel data path from 1 to 32 bits, a clock, and a data valid. In the current implementation, clock speeds are limited to 80 MHz and below, making the highest peak data transfer rate between a source and its sinks of 320 MB/s. The many connections in the FastChannel make it difficult to report an "overall" performance of the FastChannel - one specification that is often quoted is the cross section band-width, which is the sum of all active channels (non-blocked) data rates in the best cast. The cross-section bandwidth is 2.4 GB per second per FastImage board. Interboard communication is limited to 320 MB/s.

Click here for a datasheet