New Highly-Integrated VPX Chassis Manager Optimized for Security and VITA 65/SOSA Profiles

Press Release

March 16, 2021

New Highly-Integrated VPX Chassis Manager Optimized for Security and VITA 65/SOSA Profiles — Annapolis Micro Systems photo.

Annapolis, MD (March 15, 2021) – A new VITA 46.11-aligned WILD VPX Chassis Manager (WABGM0) has been introduced by Annapolis Micro Systems, a leading FPGA board and systems supplier. It enables critical chassis control, maintenance, and security functions, was developed in alignment with the SOSA Technical Standard, and offers commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) availability.

“This is a highly-integrated module supporting many functions,” said Jay Grandin, Annapolis Micro Systems VP Product Development. “It provides access to plug in card (PIC) JTAG and Maintenance ports, CLK1 usage via on-board Zynq FPGA, network functions, and some optional advanced security functions.”

For security, the Chassis Manager implements security signal interfaces and a Xilinx UltraScale+ Zynq ZU5EG MPSoC and latest Microsemi PolarFire FPGA, which can be end-user modified with purchase of the optional Board Support Package (BSP).

Other Chassis Manager features include MIL-STD-1553 support and an additional storage flash.

The Chassis Manager plugs directly into a backplane or into a 3U or 6U OpenVPX carrier that plugs into a backplane as a payload card. It fully supports VITA 66/67 by avoiding optical/RF backplane openings.

The Chassis Manager supports the SOSA management interface for all the cards in the chassis, allowing for controlled power-on/off of VPX cards and controlling main 12V power to the chassis. All this is accomplished locally, or remotely via ethernet. The management interface also allows out-of-band monitoring of board health and statistics like board temperature and power.

Another important function this Chassis Manager supports is chassis maintenance. It allows for up to four slots to be accessed in parallel (more with multiplexing) so that a user can access maintenance ports over ethernet without having to open the chassis. It also allows access to JTAG for up to four slots at a time, which allows board maintenance and recovery without having to remove boards from the chassis.

Additionally, the Chassis Manager supports many general-purpose I/O, which can be used for chassis functions or can be converted on the backplane to RS-422 for external communication. It also supports the VPX CLK1 LVDS pin, which can be used for an additional GPIO and goes to the Zynq FPGA.

The Chassis Manager can also support a “maskable reset” per slot, so it can fire this reset to any slots selected in a given mask for user-configurable partial chassis resets.

The Chassis Manager is readily integrated into any SOSA-aligned 3U or 6U VPX system, or deployed within Annapolis' proven WILD100 EcoSystem.

The WILD100 EcoSystem is an interoperable portfolio of rugged high-performance 100GbE COTS boards and systems. Notable WILD100 products include:

Annapolis high-performance products are designed for advanced HPC, ISR, and multi-function EW applications, including phased array radar, cybersecurity network processing, DRFM, beamforming, sensor processing, wireless communication, and radar signal processing.