April 3 2018 - Abaco Systems announced the VP430 Direct RF Processing System, the 3U VPX COTS solution to feature the Xilinx ZU27DR RF system-on-chip (RFSoC) technology. It is a dense analog FPGA DSP board, with eight ADC and DAC synchronized channels, and features the ability to synchronize multiple boards for even larger system applications.
When combined with Abaco’s portfolio of 3U VPX multi-architecture processing boards including single board computers and graphics processor units, the VP430 enables complete systems to be built from interoperable COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components.
The VP430 includes the option to be built with a FireFly 8-channel VITA 66.4 fiber optic interface for transfers of greater than 12 GBps for applications in which the throughput of the native VPX PCI Express Gen3 data plane is inadequate or when a remote client requires streaming data.
The VP430 enables direct RF sampling which can be implemented in the digital domain. Additionally, integration with RF sampling devices is designed to reduce the complexity of JESD204B high speed serial interfaces
The Xilinx RFSoC is a step in integration technology bringing a combination of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) processing capability, a multi-processor embedded ARM Cortex-A53 Application processing unit (APU), an ARM real time processing unit (RPU) and eight input analog-to-digital converter and eight digital-to-analog converter channels. Additionally, the Zynq Ultrascale+ architecture integrates all this with features to enable high security IP protection. The RFSoC brings extreme analog bandwidth with a sustained throughput of 6 GSPS per channel and greater than 12 GBps per channel digital offload capability.
