Abaco Wins Significant Orders for High Performance 6U VPX Single Board Computers, Ethernet Switches, FPGA Platforms
• Will help equip highly flexible advanced mobile radar/sensor system
Abaco has received orders from a major US prime contractor that will see the company’s SBC627 rugged 6U VPX single board computers, GBX460 rugged Ethernet switches and VP840/FMC168 rugged FPGA boards/mezzanines deployed as part of a highly flexible advanced mobile radar/sensor system.
Lifetime value of the program to Abaco is expected to be in excess of $80 million. “Increasingly, customers are looking to vendors who can supply as large a proportion of their requirements as possible because of the advantages that brings in guaranteed interoperability, substantially reducing the cost and effort of integration and speeding time to market,” said John Muller, Chief Growth Officer at Abaco. “The breadth and depth of our product line is proving highly attractive to such customers by simplifying acquisition, development and ongoing support.”
SBC627 Single Board Computer
The SBC627 is designed to meet the requirements of a wide range of fully rugged applications in defense and aerospace programs as well as commercial and industrial applications. It offers extended temperature capability and a range of air- and conduction cooled build levels.
A choice of high performance, highly integrated Intel® Core™ i7 processor platforms is available for the SBC627, offering integrated graphics and ECC memory controllers plus quad-core processing up to 2.7 GHz with two threads per core. Coupled with the Mobile Intel QM87 Express Chipset, this provides an unmatched level of I/O bandwidth for both on-board and off-board functions.
It also incorporates a range of security features designed to assist with user defined Anti-Tamper and Information Assurance strategies. These include an inherently secure FPGA solution (SmartFusion2 from Microsemi), Trusted Platform Monitor and support for Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology.
GBX460 Ethernet Switch
The fully managed NETernity™ GBX460 rugged 6U OpenVPX data plane switch module features Abaco’s unique OpenWare™ switch management capability, supporting high throughput interprocessor communication between 10GigE-enabled processing nodes for deployed network-centric defense and aerospace applications. Its non-blocking 10GigE ports provide high performance throughput across the VPX backplane; the non-blocking feature means that the GBX460 can pass traffic across all 10GigE ports at wire speed without bottlenecks.
Designed for deployment in security-sensitive mission critical applications, GBX460 features include denial of service attack prevention, user password mechanisms with multiple levels of security and military level authorization schemes including 802.1X and sanitization to allow the overwrite of non-volatile storage if a system is compromised.
VP840 FPGA Card
The VP840 is a single FPGA variant of the VP868 high performance 6U OpenVPX (VITA-65) compliant plug-in module with advanced digital signal processing capabilities. At the heart of the VP840 is a Xilinx® Zynq® dual ARM®-9 device for processing offload and board management. Its processing power comes from a Xilinx UltraScale™ FPGA and features over 300Gb/s duplex communication bandwidth to the backplane. An optional storage and I/O expansion module is available, supporting SATA/PCIe™ solid state drive technologies. The VP840 includes flexible I/O with one VITA 57.4 compliant FMC+ site. The board includes support for both Kintex™ and Virtex UltraScale devices with a migration path to UltraScale+™ devices.
FMC168 FPGA Mezzanine Card
The FMC168 is a digitizer FMC featuring eight ADC channels with 16-bit resolution and 250Msps sampling rate per channel. With a flexible clock generation and distribution scheme, the FMC168 allows control of sampling frequency and analog input gain through serial communication with a carrier card. Its design is based on the TI ADS42LB69 dual channel 16-bit 250Msps A/D, and it is equipped with power supply and temperature monitoring, offering several power-down modes to switch off unused functions.