PC/104 saves the day, melds a trio
ProductDecember 07, 2010
Alice Moss
Military Embedded Systems
Chris A. Ciufo
General Micro Systems, Inc.
Sundance is well-known for its high-performance signal processing wares and beefy algorithms, and its tools are an industry standard.
Sundance is well-known for its high-performance signal processing wares and beefy algorithms, and its tools are an industry standard. Now the company aims to make the PC/104 open standard even more of a household name, thanks to its Sundance Series 1 boards melding FPGAs, PowerPC440, and PCI Express on the small form factor. Highly suited for the image processing, high-speed data acquisition, and communication arenas, the series employs Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs for its two versions: The SMT100 featuring 512 MB DDR2 SDRAM (handy when it comes to data processing and buffering), in addition to the SMT105, offering a mixture of memory banks in the DDR2 SDRAM and QDR2 SRAM camps to facilitate signal processing in real time.
Then there’s the plethora of I/O that’s packed onto this small form factor board: MicroSD/Transflash, USB 2.0 FPGA interface, fiber-optic modules, and RS-232 interfaces. And it doesn’t end there. Also included: 32-bit PCI, LVTTL I/O, SATA ports, and 1- and 4-lane PCI Express links in addition to stack-down or stack-up flavors that afford automatic detection. Many different IP cores are also vended to speed time to market and foster Series 1 design integration.
