Curtiss-Wright Now Shipping Industry's First 6U FPGA Card with Trio of Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGAs
New OpenVPX™ FPGA Module Delivers Unprecedented 1 Tbps Data Rates
ASHBURN, Va. – Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW) today announced that its Defense Solutions division has begun shipping early access units of the recently introduced CHAMP-FX4 module, believed to be the industry's highest performing COTS 6U FPGA engine, to customers in the aerospace and defense industry. The rugged, high-performance OpenVPX™ (VITA 65) board, the industry's first COTS 6U FPGA engine to feature triple on-board Xilinx® Virtex®-7 devices in a single chassis slot, is scheduled for full L0 production in Q2 2014.
Curtiss-Wright also announced that it has successfully demonstrated all of the CHAMP-FX4's 18 on-board FPGA SerDes and all of its 40 backplane FPGA SerDes running at 10.3 Gbps in both directions simultaneously with no bit errors. The test included transfers through Curtiss-Wright's latest 10Gbps OpenVPX backplane in the COOL-XC6 OpenVPX Development Chassis. The results validate the high speed design rules used for the CHAMP-FX4 while establishing a new performance benchmark for an FPGA board of this class by demonstrating the movement of >1 Terabit of data per second (Tbps). The combination of the board's unprecedented I/O performance and its complementary on-board memory bandwidth, which also approaches 1 Tbps data rates, establishes the CHAMP-FX4 as the highest performing COTS 6U FPGA board available today.
"We are very pleased to announce that we are now shipping our CHAMP-FX4 FPGA engine," said Lynn Bamford, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions division. "With its stunning 1 Tbps performance, the CHAMP-FX4 continues our long established leadership in the development of rugged FPGA-based computing products. Building on the performance breakthroughs delivered by our recent CHAMP-WB VPX module, the CHAMP-FX4 provides the superior bandwidth and reconfigurable processing our customers demand for their critical front-end sensor processing applications."
The CHAMP-FX4 utilizes the Xilinx FPGAs with the highest DSP density resulting in a total of 10,800 DSP48E hard macros. These DSP blocks provide over 3 TFLOPs of DSP processing which is ideal for beamforming and other challenging DSP algorithms.
The CHAMP-FX4 board is Curtiss-Wright's 4th generation FPGA product, and leverages the design expertise derived from previous generations of CHAMP family FPGA modules, and is architected to be able to support large digital beam former applications which require vast amounts of FPGA processing and I/O bandwidth. The new board is also designed to speed and simplify the integration of high performance FPGA processing for demanding applications such as Radar Processing, Signal Intelligence (SIGINT), ISR, Image Processing, Network Processing and Electronic Warfare (EW). It is ideal for use in C4ISR platforms such as Digital Beam Formers, Digital Receivers, and Radar Processors deployed in shipboard, airborne, ground and base station military environments.
About the CHAMP-FX4
The CHAMP-FX4 is the rugged COTS market's first 6U VPX board to feature three (3) Xilinx® Virtex®-7 FPGAs (585T or X690T) in an FFG1761 package, one of the largest FPGAs in the Virtex-7 family. The CHAMP-FX4 uses the -2 speed grade version of the FPGA to provide maximum performance over the full industrial temperature range. Two of the CHAMP-FX4's three Virtex-7 FPGAs serve as "I/O" FPGAs and are connected to FMC (VITA 57) mezzanine sites as well as to the backplane SerDes. The third Virtex-7 device is the board's "Aggregator" FPGA and is connected to the Backplane Expansion Plane.
The CHAMP-FX4 is also the first 6U VPX product to support the new Zynq®-7000 All Programmable SoC from Xilinx which includes an embedded dual-core ARM® Cortex™ A9 processor. By combining the Xilinx 28nm programmable logic with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processing system into a single device, the Zynq device is able to provide an efficient processor footprint, freeing more of the board's real estate for FPGA related processing.
Rugged Build Options
The CHAMP-FX4 is offered with a wide range of ruggedization configurations, including commercial, air-cooled rugged and conduction-cooled. Contact Curtiss-Wright for details.
Complete System Solutions
The new CHAMP-FX4 is the flagship 6U product in Curtiss-Wright's industry-leading family of user-programmable Virtex-7 FPGA-based computing products. These boards are designed to meet the needs of challenging embedded high-performance digital signal and image processing applications. It is the newest addition to Curtiss-Wright's HPEC (High Performance Embedded Computing) product family and complements Curtiss-Wright's wide range of Intel® and Power® Architecture-based VME and VPX SBCs, DSP engines and GP-GPU engines, such as the CHAMP-WB-DRFM, VPX6-1957, and the recently announced CHAMP-AV9, as well as Curtiss-Wright's broad range of signal processing I/O FMC mezzanine products including the FMC-516/518. Combining these products with Curtiss-Wright's switch and backplane products, such as the COOL-XC6 OpenVPX Development Chassis, enables system designers to quickly and easily develop interoperable highly scalable, high performance systems.
Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGAs and Radar/EW applications
Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGAs are ideal for use in rugged deployed Radar/EW subsystem applications. In addition to delivering unmatched DSP density, Xilinx is supporting defense and aerospace system developers with tools that ease and speed application. These tools include Xilinx's Vivado Design Suite and Vivado High-Level Synthesis (HLS). Vivado Design Suite provides improved device utilization, repeatability, and reduced run times on high utilization designs for Radar/EW applications. While Vivado HLS enables direct translation from C, C++, and SystemC to Xilinx FPGAs. The CHAMP-FX4 toolkit, which provides the Linux or VxWorks software, FPGA IP, reference designs, and simulation environment for the CHAMP-FX4, fully supports the Vivado Design Suite today.
Additional Information
Please contact the factory for additional information and availability. Click here for more information on the CHAMP-FX4.
Sales inquiries: Please forward all Sales and reader service inquiries to Kavita Williams, Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions, Tel: (661) 705-1142; Fax: (661) 705-1206; email: defensesales@curtisswright.com.
For more information about Curtiss-Wright's Defense Solutions division, please visit www.cwcdefense.com.
About Curtiss-Wright Corporation
Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE:CW) is a global innovative company that delivers highly engineered, critical function products and services to the commercial, industrial, defense and energy markets. Building on the heritage of Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers, Curtiss-Wright has a long tradition of providing reliable solutions through trusted customer relationships. The company employs approximately 10,000 people worldwide. For more information, visit www.curtisswright.com.
