Intel® Xeon® D 3U VPX Single Board Computers with Integrated Security FPGAs Now Available

September 2016

Extreme Engineering Solutions (X-ES) has announced two new 3U VPX embedded single board computers based on the Intel® Xeon® D-1500 processor family. These powerful boards support up to 16 Xeon®-class cores in a single, power-efficient System-on-Chip (SoC) package with native extended temperature support on four, eight, and twelve core-count SKUs.

XPedite7674

The XPedite7674 is an Intel® Xeon® D-1500 processor-based 3U VPX single board computer that can support up to 16 core-count SKUs with native extended temperature support on up to 12 core-count SKUs.

With an integrated, user-configurable, Xilinx Kintex® UltraScale™ FPGA module delivering enhanced performance and security for a wide range of embedded computing applications, the board supports a variety of I/O to the VPX connectors, including dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GBASE-KR), SATA port capable of 6 Gb/s, USB 2.0, and RS-232/422/485 serial ports.

The FPGA also provides GPIO, 1000BASE-X Gigabit Ethernet, and High-Speed Serial ports to the VPX connectors. The XMC site supports a x8 PCI Express Gen3-capable port and a SATA port, as well as XMC P16 I/O, mapping P1w9-X12d per VITA 46.9.

XPedite7676

The XPedite7676 is a secure, Intel® Xeon® D-1500 processor-based 3U VPX single board computer
that can support up to 16 core-count SKUs with native extended temperature support on up to 12 core-count SKUs.

The XPedite7676 integrates SecureCOTS™ technology with a Microsemi SmartFusion®2 security System-on-Chip (SoC) for hosting custom functions to protect data from being modified or observed and provides an ideal solution when stringent security capabilities are required.

Dual 10GBASE-KR 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 10/100/1000BASE-T Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, SATA ports capable of 6 Gb/s, RS-232/422/485 serial, dual x4 PCI Express Gen3, and GPIO are all routed to the backplane VPX connectors.



Both the XPedite7674 and the XPedite7676 support the Wind River VxWorks Board Support Package (BSP), coreboot firmware powered by Intel® FSP to enable rapid and reliable sub-2.5 second boot times, and the X-ES Enterprise Linux (XEL) BSP.

Sarsen Technology Now Representing MilesTek in the UK

About MilesTek

www.milestek.com

Since 1981 Milestek has grown to become a global distributor delivering complete connectivity solutions and custom cable assemblies to over 60,000 customers. Milestek offers quality products, in stock for short delivery timescales, and quick turnaround on your custom requirements.

Headquartered in Denton, Texas, the professional sales and technical team supports the rep network to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction to avionics designers, broadcast and DS3/telecom industries, government and military users and industrial networking companies.

Sarsen Technology supplies and supports the full range of Milestek products and solutions, including MIL-STD-1553B cables and adapters, data bus couplers, bus and stub cables, coaxial-RF cable assemblies and triaxial connectors, cables and cable assemblies.

Coaxial, Military and Industrial Networking Solutions, Telemetry Solutions
MilesTek is a global provider for a vast range of connectivity products, patch cords and panels; connectors and adapters; coaxial, twinaxial, and Triaxial cable assemblies, as well as custom cable assemblies and complete harness assemblies for industrial and Military. These products service the industrial, Military and government markets.

Military Avionics and MIL-STD-1553B Solutions
MilesTek has delivered connectivity products and solutions to the avionics industry worldwide for over twenty-five years. Our product offering, used primarily in military R&D and production applications, consists of a complete line of bus couplers, custom harnesses and assemblies, connectors and connector termination systems and a broad range of related accessories.

Join us at the next FPGA Network meet-up on Tuesday 11th October in Swindon!

FPGA experts who care about tools and methodologies can’t afford to miss the next meeting of the NMI FPGA Network... You will find this meeting especially compelling if you are an architect, designer, verification specialist, project manager or engineering manager.

We know how important design tools and methodologies are in creating better FPGA designs and FPGA systems-based, this is why we are excited to be sponsoring this event and would be delighted to see you there too!

On the day we will contribute to the debate with a discussion on ‘FPGA Platform Development Kit Enables Fast TTM’ delivered by Chad Hamilton, VP of Intellectual Property (IP), Software and Support at BittWare.

Chad will join the discussion along with FPGA specialists from other Industry leaders.

Confirmed Speakers 
Synopsys: Flexible debug and visibility techniques to enhance all FPGA design and deployment cycles
BittWare: FPGA platform development kit enables fast TTM
Mentor Graphics: Staying competitive by evolving your FPGAverification methodologies
Bitvis AS: A game changer for VHDL verification: advanced VHDL verification – made simple for anyone
Telexsus: FPGA real-time debug with vastly increased operational capture time – live demo
Cadence: 100M gate designs in FPGAs – fact or fiction?
Altera now part of Intel: Zen and the art of high-speed design
Xilinx: Vivado HLx Design Methodology
ITDev: Static code analysis using Blue Pearl software

See full details (pdf)

We are also very pleased to have Manuele Papais from DAVE Embedded Systems with us, showcasing their Xilinx Zynq based hardware and talking to engineers about Asymmetric Multi Processing on Cortex-A CPU: system integrity and reliability on Linux and RTOS cores.

Find out more and book your place here.

We look forward to seeing you at the FPGA Network Event ‘Design Tools and Methodologies’!

Christos Flouris Nominated for Elektra Awards!

The Elektra European Electronics Industry Awards is a hugely important night, circled in calendars across the entire European electronics industry. Open to any company involved in Electronics the awards cover everyone from manufacturers and distributors to universities and design teams.

On Thursday 1st December the industry will get together to celebrate the most exciting new products, technology innovations and company performances of the year. An independent panel of judges will compare the merits of all the entries and the winners will be announced at the Awards Ceremony at Grosvenor House Hotel in London.

We are very excited to announce that one of our Sales Engineers, Christos Flouris, has reached the final shortlist of the Rising Star New Engineer of the Year category. This award is given to a talented young engineer in their first five years in the industry, who has shown an extremely high level of practical skill and ambition which has contributed significantly to the business.

Christos graduated from the University of Bath in 2015 with a MEng (Hons) Electrical and Electronic Engineering degree. Since joining Sarsen Technology in September 2015 as a Sales Engineer, Christos has worked on some major projects, specialising in technologies including FPGA , Single Board Computers (SBCs), ARM based System on Modules (SoM) and rugged system level solutions.

Congratulations to Christos, we look forward to the announcement of the winners in December!

BittWare Releases Arria 10 OpenCL BSPs for Altera OpenCL SDK 16.0.2 Release

BittWare has recently announced the availability of Arria 10 FPGA Board Support Packages (BSPs) for Altera's recently released OpenCL SDK 16.0.2, including support for production silicon.

See full press release

BittWare’s OpenCL BSPs allow customers to develop applications for the Altera Arria 10 1150GX FPGA using OpenCL quickly and easily. OpenCL makes FPGA development much simpler by enabling designers to code their systems and algorithms in a high-level C-based framework, directly generating FPGA programming files from a pure software development flow.

FPGAs can dramtically improve speed and increase responsiveness for many system designs, in markets as diverse as defense/aerospace, fintech and life sciences. BittWare offers BSP variants to support High Performance Computing (HPC) as well as Network Processing applications.


"We've worked closely with Altera to ensure that our OpenCL BSPs provide the best quality results possible," said Chad Hamilton, BittWare VP of IP, Software & Support. "For those customers who prefer to code in a C-based framework, our OpenCL BSPs provide the tools necessary to get them up and running quickly and efficiently."

OpenCL Developers Bundle
The BittWare OpenCL BSPs are included in the OpenCL Developer’s Bundle, which includes a BittWare Arria 10 or Stratix V PCIe board, the BittWorks II system development software, the Altera Quartus II soft­ware, and the Altera SDK for OpenCL. This competitvely priced development bundle gives developers access to the latest generation of high-performance FPGAs on a validated PCIe board, while also significantly reducing their time ­to market by using OpenCL to develop their application.

Benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs

• Faster time-to-market using the OpenCL C-based parallel programming language as opposed to low-level hardware description language (HDL)
• Quick design exploration by working at a higher level of design abstraction
• Easy design re-use by re-targeting existing OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs
• Faster design completion by generating an FPGA implementation of OpenCL C code in a single step, bypassing the manual timing closure efforts and implementation of communication interfaces between the FPGA, host, and external memories.
• Increased performance by offloading performance- intensive functions from the host processor to the FPGA
• Significantly lower power than a GPU or multicore CPU by using the Altera SDK for OpenCL, which generates only the logic needed