GLASGOW, Scotland, 23 Jan. 2010 Nallatech announced the first shipment of the PCIe-180, a low profile PCI Express field programmable gate array (FPGA) accelerator card featuring a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interface directly coupled to a Xilinx FPGA.

The PCIe-180 is the latest product to be introduced to Nallatech's Embedded PCI series of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGA solutions and is targeted at signals intelligence, network security and algorithm acceleration applications.

The PCIe-180 features an onboard Xilinx Virtex-5 user FPGA directly coupled to a high bandwidth, flexible memory configuration that includes ECC and parity protection. Five independent banks of DDR-II SRAM provide as much as 10 gigabytes per second of sustained, random access memory bandwidth. A single bank of DDR2 SDRAM memory provides 4 gigabytes per second of deep storage local to the user FPGA. The PCIe-180 is integrated to the host platform via an 8-lane PCI Express connection supporting sustained bandwidths as fast as 2.2 gigabytes per second. Optimized VHDL memory controller IP cores and reference designs are included as part of the standard product deliverables along with driver and API source code for 64-bit Linux operating systems.

"The adoption of 10Gb Ethernet is well underway," says Craig Petrie, product manager at Nallatech. "The increased bandwidths associated with 10GbE offer many benefits, but also present new challenges for customers trying to process and manage this torrent of data in real time. The PCIe-180 will allow customers to use the Xilinx FPGA and associated external memory as an effective, low power data-centric processing engine."

The PCIe-180 complies with the low profile half height, half-length PCI Express mechanical specification. This enables compatibility with almost all high-density server and blade center platforms from leading OEMs such as HP, IBM, DELL, CRAY, and SGI, Nallatech officials say. Depending upon configuration, pricing for the PCIe-180 starts at $2,995 in volume production.