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Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing in Dayton, Ohio, is offering a rugged quad-channel Serial Front Panel Data Port (SFPDP) card that delivers sustained data rates as fast as 247 megabits per second on each of its four channels. The FibreXtreme SL100/SL240 Serial FPDP card, based on Altera’s Stratix II GX field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), connects distributed devices through a specialized VITA 17.1-2003 communications protocol. The cards, available in PCI and XMC mezzanine formats, are for digital signal processing, radar and sonar, medical imaging, as well as range and telemetry systems. The SFPDP card off-loads the host processor, enabling data transfers to occur without the CPU overhead and non-deterministic latencies associated with many layers of complex software protocols. The FibreXtreme SL100/SL240 Serial FPDP card supports a 2.5 GHz serial data link that uses the VITA 17.1-2003 communications protocol for maximum data throughput. The card’s on-board DMA engine handles single transactions as large as 64 megabits without processor intervention. DMA and register byte/word swapping provide additional system flexibility. The board supports 2.5 gigabit-per-second transmission rates (1 gigabit per second data rates supported on the SL100, and 2.5 gigabit per second on the SL240) between interconnected subsystems separated by as much as 31 miles and low-latency performance. The FibreXtreme card uses the Stratix II GX FPGA to obtain full throughput rate on all four SFPDP channels while providing a full-rate PCI Express host bus interface. The embedded transceivers in the FPGA support data rates in excess of 6 gigabits per second, enabling future performance enhancement. For more information, visit Curtiss-Wright online at www.cwcontrols.com.