Kontron VPX/OpenVPX ecosystem additions

Kontron has announced several additions to its VPX/OpenVPX ecosystem including the 3U VPX PCI Express and ethernet hybrid switch VX3905, the 3U FMC carrier board VX3830, the 3U XMC/PMC carrier board VX3800 as well as OpenVPX backplanes.

With these building blocks, alongside the VXFabric IP socket API for data management, the company claims to provide a VPX ecosystem.

The focus of these additions to the VPX/OpenVPX ecosystem surrounds the optimisation of the data plane in VPX/OpenVPX multiprocessor systems and to relieve OEMs and developers from the complex, low-level hardware and data management.

The OpenVPX backplanes are compliant to the VITA 46.4 specification and provide a high bandwidth PCI Express architecture for the data plane. They are available with a distributed or centralised configuration and enable OEMs to set up nearly all possible system topologies. The distributed backplanes come in a 3-, 4- or 5-slot configuration. The centralised backplane features six payload slots and two switch or storage slots with gigabit ethernet on the control plane.

All VPX boards can be used with these backplanes, including the 6U VPX dual CPU board VX6060.

The 3U VPX PCI Express and ethernet hybrid switch VX3905 is suitable for the centralised backplane to handle a high bandwidth. It provides up to 24 ports with 32 lane PCI Express Gen 1/Gen 2 switching and additional 9-port gigabit ethernet switching capabilities for the control plane.

It offers a tenfold increase in I/O bandwidth between computing boards in high-performance embedded computing applications compared to VME.

With the VX3830 and VX3800 OEMs can expand the I/O flexibility of their dedicated VPX systems. The 3U FPGA mezzanine card carrier board VX3830 is based on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA and offers enhanced I/O capabilities with high integrated performance logic. It is designed to support any standard XMC/PMC mezzanines.

The VXFabric is a set of ready-to-use libraries and kernel modules. The highest level of communication bandwidth is achieved through classic Linux and TCP or UDP sockets based on PCI Express physical layer.