Posted by Courtney Howard
CAMARILLO, Calif., 10 May 2010. Nallatech, a supplier of high-performance COTSFPGA solutions, announced its PCIe-280, an 8-lane PCI Express 2.0 FPGA accelerator card. The PCIe-280, able to increase application performance by harnessing up to 5GByte/sec of sustained host bandwidth, is targeted at signal intelligence, network security, and algorithm acceleration applications.
The PCIe-280 features an onboard Xilinx Virtex-5 user FPGA directly coupled to a high-bandwidth, flexible memory configuration that includes ECC and parity protection. Two independent banks of QDR-II SRAM provide 8GBytes/sec of sustained, random access memory bandwidth. Up to two banks of DDR2 SDRAM memory provide 4GBytes/sec of deep storage local to the user FPGAs. Thirty-two high-speed serial I/O links are exposed at the top of the card, allowing multiple PCIe-280 cards to be interconnected via low-latency, point-to-point links.
“Market demand for FPGA-attached server and blade platforms is growing rapidly as customers begin to deploy hybrid computing platforms in greater volumes,” says Craig Petrie, product manager at Nallatech. “Sustained host bandwidth performance is a critical parameter for many customer applications.”
The PCIe-280 is compatible with high-density server and blade centre platforms from OEMs such as Cray, Dell, HP, IBM, SGI, and Supermicro. 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. Onboard FPGA, memory, and I/O can be increased through population of compatible DIME-II modules.
