Texas Instruments and 4DSP Collaborate on FPGA Mezzanine Card

Texas Instruments (News - Alert) Incorporated (TI) and 4DSP have announced that they are working together on a new mezzanine card, the FMC667, for mission-critical applications.

The FMC667 will henceforth be sold as a Digital Signal Processor (News - Alert) FMC daughter card, based on the Texas Instruments TMS320C6678 device. The Mezzanine card will also utilize TI's DRAM memory and peripherals.

Company officials say their FMC667 can effectively and rapidly meet the essential requirements of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)-based systems with the use of TI's high-performance C6678 multicore DSP.

This addition will also enhance the processing power, accuracy and finer resolution in mission-critical and industrial applications.

According to the company, the FMC is equipped with power supply and temperature monitoring, and offers several power-down modes to switch off unused functions and peripheral interfaces. Several Gigabit differential pairs from the FMC connector are used to implement a PCIe and Serial Rapid IO interface between the FMC and the carrier.

Many other digital I/O interfaces are also made available to the FMC carrier as well.

Because of the use of level translators between the DSP and the FMC connector, the FMC667 can fully operate on any VITA 57.1 compliant carrier.

"TI's multicore software development kit made it easy for us to develop support libraries for our FMC667 card," said Arnaud Maye, Embedded Software Manager at 4DSP. "With eight 1.25 GHz cores in parallel and the built-in capability to be a PCIe root complex, TI's C6678 DSP affirms itself as a control and high-end processing node for the most demanding applications."

4DSP's FMC667 card is basically designed for use in applications where an FPGA and DSP act as a co-processor of one another, such as video, telecom infrastructure, imaging, medical and wireless infrastructure markets. The card is also fitted with power supply and temperature monitoring, offering several power-down modes to switch off unused functions and peripheral interfaces.

The FMC667 mezzanine card will be out in the market by the middle of this month.