DIREC Catalina Research Digital Receiver and Reconfigurable Computing Board

DIREC is a 6U x 160 mm single-slot VME board which addresses three application areas: 1) digital receiving and tuning, 2) reconfigurable computing, and 3) digital-to-analog conversion.

DIREC provides two parallel channels. Each channel has an input FPGA (4036XLA), a Graychip GC1012 wideband digital tuner ASIC, another 4036XLA, a Graychip GC2011 digital filter ASIC, and an output XC4013 FPGA. Any of these devices may be bypassed to provide a solution which specifically fits an application's processing and budgetary requirements. Full functionality of the GC1012 and GC2011 is supported, including modes for stand-alone, cascaded, vector data, continuous data, coherent, and non-coherent processing. DIREC supports real time mode switching.

The DIREC motherboard is a generic DSP platform: it contains high-speed front panel I/O and FPGAs. The FPGAs are in-circuit programmable, and have enough capacity to support reconfigurable computing and FPGA-based DSP applications.

The Graychip ASICs (and two more FPGAs) are located on a daughter card. The user may elect to purchase both the motherboard and the daughter card for digital receiver applications, or the motherboard alone for reconfigurable computing applications. The motherboard is also an excellent base on which custom processing daughter cards may be developed.

The DIREC motherboard has two front panel parallel ports. Either may be configured as input or output, and either may be configured as the Front Panel Data Port (FPDP) protocol or CRI's own QuickComm (QC64) interface. QC64 is a 64-bit wide port capable of sustaining transfer rates beyond 400 MB/ second. FPDP is typically used to interface DIREC to third-party hardware, while QC64 provides extremely high-bandwidth I/O for demanding applications.

DIREC, via QC64™, also supports and inserts header words into the data stream. The function of the headers may be defined to address customer-specific requirements. The interface also supports data word arbitration, where data vectors may be routed from multiple sources to a single destination or from a single source to multiple destinations.

The flexible front panel interfaces allow DIREC to act as a building block in systems, allowing plug-and-play integration capabilities.

The DIREC board also offers, via an optional daughter card, dual channel digital-to- analog conversion using the Harris HI5741 14 bit, 100 MHz DAC. Front panel SMA connectors provide the analog outputs.