VMETRO adds quad-core engine, SBC to 6U VPX line

VMETRO rolled two 6U VPX-REDI products: the MPE730, a 6U VITA 46/48 quad-core PowerPC multiprocessing engine, and the SBC731, a 6U VPX-REDI single board computer (SBC).

The MPE730 integrates dual Freescale Power Architecture MPC8641D processors and Serial RapidIO fabric connectivity, making it well suited for demanding, deployed multicore applications such as radar, sensor, and signal processing. And the SBC731 that supports a single MPC8641D processor and the Serial RapidIO fabric is targeted at host board applications such as mission and control processors.

Both of these COTS products utilize powerful processing and high-speed interconnect technology. The MPE730 supports two single or dual core 1.0/1.33/1.5GHz Freescale MPC8641D processors for up to four PowerPC processors with up to 1Gbyte of DDR2 memory per processor core for a total of up to 4Gbytes of memory. The SBC731 also supports a single or dual core 1.0/1.33/1.5GHz MPC8641D processor with up to 1Gbyte of DDR2 memory per processor core. Both boards incorporate PCIe and Serial RapidIO switches for on-board interconnects as well as backplane communication with support for Serial RapidIO on the P1 fabric connector and a single x8 or dual x4 PCIe connection(s) to the P3 connector, providing for multiprocessing systems and expansion I/O.

To meet a wide range of application needs, there are two XMC/PMC sites on both the MPE730 and SBC731. Each site supports PCI/PCI-X up to 64bit/133MHz, PCIe x4/x8 and Serial RapidIO x4. Each XMC/PMC site also supports VITA 46.9 I/O connections through the Jn4/6 connectors, providing maximum I/O density and flexibility in a 6U form factor. For system control and chassis management, the boards utilize a Xilinx Virtex-5 LX FPGA known as the System Control Node that controls power and temperature monitoring, bit stream encryption and routing of I/O.

- Ismini Scouras
eeProductCenter