G4DSPXD3-41B4 Radstone Signal Board DSP Processor

The GE Fanuc / Radstone G4DSP Signal Board DSP Processor is an extremely powerful signal processing engine incorporating four MPC-7410 (with AltiVec) compute nodes in a single-slot VME 6U form factor. Performance in excess of 14 GFLOPs means the G4DSP ideally suits situations such as Radar, Sonar, and other signal processing applications where the highest levels of DSP performance are required.

The G4-7410 version of the G4DSP is the latest variant of the G4DSP design. It is application compatible with previous versions of the board but care must be taken with selection of paddle cards as there are a number of signal changes that make the new version unsuitable for use with the paddle cards used with the previous version.

Each of the four MPC-7410 (G4) compute nodes comprises 256 Mbytes of SDRAM, 16 Mbytes of FLASH, 2 Mbytes of L2 Cache, a Xilinx 7410XC95144XV interrupt controller PLD, and an IBM CPC710-133 64-bit/66 MHz PCI bridge. Providing each G4 compute node with its own dedicated PCI bridge allows each nodes PCI bandwidth to be optimized. Additionally, each G4 compute node uses its processor bus independently. Again, this maximizes processor I/O bandwidth, lowers latencies, and optimizes overall processor performance.

On-board inter-node communications are achieved through a loosely coupled, multiple 64-bit/66 MHz PCI bus architecture. This architecture accommodates a common shared-memory area for low-level message passing (supporting VxMP and VSPWorks), and a compute node shared-memory area for fast node-to-node communications, where each compute node has a unique shared-memory area with each of its neighbors. This innovative architecture is made possible by the use of non-transparent PCI-to-PCI bridges and PCI memory mapping, resulting in very fast and efficient multi-processing that does not inhibit PCI bus performance.

The G4DSP provides two independent 64-bit/66 MHz PMC sites for data acquisition and multi-board connectivity. These PMC sites accommodate industry-standard PMC modules from Radstone or thirdparties. Additionally, the G4DSP provides a 32-bit/33 MHz P0 PCI Master/Slave interface, and VME64. G4DSP is suitable for use with PMCs that require impedance and length-matched tracking for applications such as Fibre Channel and PanelLink.

As with the hardware architecture, software support is also open-standard to protect software investment and ease development. The G4DSP supports VxWorks and VxMP, ChaMPIon/RT and VSI/Pro (from MPI Software Technology) on top of VxWorks, and Wind River Systems VSPWorks real time operating system. This is backed up by Radstones Built-In-Test (BIT) and driver support for Radstone PowerX SBCs under VxWorks.

The G4DSP is available in Radstones five electrically-compatible build levels. These have two basic mechanical configurations:
• Air (convection)-cooled (build levels 1 to 3) in accordance with ANSI/VITA 1-1994 specification, designed to be used in standard industrial VME chassis
• Conduction-cooled (build levels 4 and 5) in accordance with IEEE Std 1101.2-1992, for use in Radstone or third party ATR style enclosures.
In addition to these COTS configurations, G4DSP may be supplied to meet the mechanical and thermal requirements of specific platforms with the addition of mission specific, to-type mechanics. Radstone uses advanced thermal and mechanical design in the PCB, metal work and assembly process to build-in the required levels of ruggedness. Build level 2 and higher circuit card assemblies include conformal coating. All five styles fully support the power and versatility of the VMEbus, so no matter how large or diversified your project, absolute compatibility is assured at all stages of development.