Scalable Virtex-7 Platforms

Eletter Product

Star Communications makes the PVP7 family of digital receivers, and the PCA7 family of computing accelerators. These products are small, powerful, affordable, and easy to use. Both products are scalable from 1 to 4 high-end Virtex-7 FPGAs. Cards install in any PC or server using a high-speed PCI Express interface. Applications for PVP7 include surveillance, direction finding, SIGINT, radar, and signal processing. Applications for PCA7 include image processing, network security, cyber warfare, and biometrics.

The PVP7 family combines 1 to 4 digital receivers with up to four Xilinx XC7VX485T FPGAs on a standard PCI Express card. A single card can execute over 6x1012 multiply-and-accumulate instructions per second (>6 TeraMACS). When installed in a customer's host system, a PVP7 provides a complete IF-to-DMA path for receiving wireless signals, processing, and sending results to the host via PCI Express. External equipment mixes radio signals down to a programmable intermediate frequency (IF), and after filtering inputs the signals to the PVP7 card. The IF design allows a single card to be used for multi-channel / multi-band operation at any RF including satellite, cellular, microwave, etc. Input signals are sampled at a programmable sample rate.

The PCA7 family is scalable from 1 to 4 Xilinx XC7VX485T FPGAs on a standard PCI Express card. A single card can execute over 65x1012 operations per second (>65 TeraOPS). Transfers to and from the host computer use direct memory access (DMA) via the high-speed PCI Express interface. One card contains up to 11200 ALUs plus 8240 individually addressable dual-port RAMs. Memory read/write bandwidth is over 270 Terabits/sec.