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Featured Product
Important Industry Pack Update
Acromag in Action
Real-Time Show
Ask the I/O Experts
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Featured Product
Industry Pack Mezzanine Maintains Its Popularity
Although much of the buzz these days surrounds advances in PMC and XMC technology, the original embedded mezzanine standard, the Industry Pack (IP), is still very useful and often the best option for many new projects. Acromag continues to develop IP products to take advantage of new technologies such as re-configurable FPGAs and to update existing designs for higher performance and extended lifecycles. So, don’t discount this mature technology. The venerable IP module has many advantages that can’t be matched and may be the right solution for your next embedded design.
Very high channel density
Many Industry Pack carrier cards can hold four or more IP modules which lets you process a lot of I/O channels through a single card slot. Acromag’s APC8620A PCI carrier card can hold five IP modules to provide 200 A/D or digital I/O channels on a single board
Mix and match flexibility
You can also install different I/O module types in each IP slot to develop custom I/O boards with analog I/O, digital I/O, counter/timers, serial communication, and many other functions. Combining multiple functions on a single card greatly reduces costs and saves your system’s card slots for other purposes. Acromag offers more than 100 IP modules and with hundreds more available from many other vendors, you’ll surely find what you need.
Economical FPGA computing
High-performance FPGAs are now available on Industry Pack modules. Acromag’s new IP-EP200 features a Cyclone-II FPGA that provides more than 18,000 logic elements, a large quantity of high-speed embedded multipliers, and plenty of RAM.
Unsurpassed support
With many vendors developing IP products, you’ll enjoy a full range of hardware accessories and software support products. Acromag provides C libraries of function routines for VxWorks, QNX, Linux, and Windows operating systems. Additionally, a complement of termination panels, transition modules and cables provide one-stop shopping to complete your system.
Proven dependability
While switched fabric technologies are the future, no mezzanine format has more installations than the Industry Pack standard. Acromag has hundreds of satisfied customers in defense, aerospace, advanced research, manufacturing and other critical applications. Whether you are using VMEbus, PCI, or CompactPCI platforms, you can rely on Industry Packs for dependable operation and long-term availability.
Important Industry Pack Update
IP330 Analog Input Module Updated
To support our OEM and military customers, Acromag strives to manufacture products with stable designs and long life spans. Over the years, Acromag has made lifetime buys of discontinued parts to prevent an early demise of a popular product. In other cases, Acromag has redesigned boards to maintain form, fit, and functional equivalency.
In keeping with this policy, Acromag has redesigned the IP330 Industry Pack module because critical parts have been discontinued. The new IP330A will function as a drop-in replacement for the original model, and all specifications will be equal to or better than the original design.
Acromag has enough components on hand to fill all existing orders for the IP330 and plans to accept orders through December 2007, assuming components remain available. Currently, extended temperature versions (-E) are in limited supply and customers should contact Acromag for current availability. As with all Acromag products, we will support these models for at least seven years after their end-of-life date.
Acromag will start accepting orders for the new IP330A and their extended temperature (-E) versions on July 1, 2007.
Demo units are available for customers who would like to test these replacement models prior to purchasing. Please contact Acromag or your local representative for information on obtaining a document listing “known differences” between the IP330 and IP330A or a demo unit for test purposes.
Acromag in Action
Arxan Technologies Inc., headquartered in Bethesda, MD, recently procured a PMC-LX60 module for their subsidiary, Arxan Research in Madison, AL. This module is being used in support of their anti-tampering software for a government contract. The team behind vendor Arxan technologies began designing the product five years ago at Purdue University with funding from the National Security Agency.
The military incorporates Arxan technology into weapons systems to prevent tampering. For example, if a weapon went down in enemy territory and did not explode or self-destruct, hackers could use reverse engineering techniques to learn how the missile was built and make duplicates. Arxan prevents this scenario by placing modules of object code into software at the binary level. Today almost every single major defense weapon has anti-tampering software installed as part of their configuration.
The success of Arxan’s software system in protecting software from piracy and tampering is now being released to the commercial sector to help software companies avoid loss of intellectual property.
Real-Time Show
See Acromag at the Real-Time & Embedded Computing Conference which is designed for those developing computer systems and time-critical applications serving multiple industries; data communication and telephony, military and aerospace, industrial control, instrumentation, consumer electronics, image processing, process control, medical instrumentation, vehicular control and maintenance, embedded appliances and more.
Next Show:
August 21, 2007 - Colorado Springs, CO
Ask the I/O Experts
Waveform Playback with On-the-Fly Parametric Variation
Question:
How can I store a waveform that is either created in a simulation software program (e.g. MathLab or MathWorks) or captured by sampling and play back the waveform with real-time parametric amplitude and frequency modifications? The system to be used is a PCI-based workstation running Windows, but the size of the sampled waveform (approaching 4K samples) and the playback frequency require very fast throughput.
Answer:
The recommended solution is to use a high-performance PMC analog I/O module with a user-configurable FPGA on a PCI carrier card. Acromag’s PMC-AX module features a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA which offers ample memory to store the raw waveform and plenty of processing power for real-time generation of the modified playback waveform. Installing the PMC-AX module on Acromag’s APC-PMC carrier card and plugging it into the workstation’s PCI bus will significantly increase the system’s throughput capability.
The PMC-AX analog I/O module features four channels of 16-bit A/D with either 20MHz or 65Mhz sampling and two channels of 900KHz D/A. Additional features include a 4096-sample FIFO, DMA and interrupt capabilities, dual-ported SRAM, plus support for an external clock and trigger. Waveform information can be stored in the FIFO buffer via DMA transfer or recorded through one of the A/D channels. Parameters for Amplitude and frequency modification parameters are transferred to the PMC-AX module through the dual-ported SRAM.
Acromag’s Engineering Design Kit helps system designers quickly develop custom FPGA programs using the included example code. Under control of VHDL code executed on the Virtex-II FPGA, playback of the stored waveform can be initiated with real-time amplitude and frequency modification applied.
For more information on this application or for assistance with your project, please call our sales engineers at 248-295-0310 or e-mail solutions@acromag.com.
Other Acromag News
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