António Batista

Summary and highlights of research achievements

Development of an ATCA/AXIe blade designed for Fast Control and Data Acquisition Systems.

The blade is compatible with PICMG 3.0/3.4 and AXIe specifications, comprises a passive RTM for rear IO connectivity to ease hot-swap maintenance and simultaneously to increase cabling life cycle. Also includes PICMG 3.0/3.4 redundancy support, in order to provide high levels of system reliability and availability.

Is a high channel number IO board with galvanic isolation and FPGA based processing. Simultaneously digitized data from all ADCs of the board can be filtered/decimated in the FPGA, decreasing data throughput, increasing resolution, and sent through PCI Express to multi-core processors in the ATCA shelf hub slots. Concurrently the multi-core processors can update the board DACs in real-time. Full-duplex point-to-point communication links between all FPGAs, of peer blades inside the shelf, allow the implementation of distributed algorithms and MIMO systems. Support for several Timing and Synchronization architectures is provided.

Figures show the board FPGA firmware block diagram, board block diagram and the board interconnections inside the shelf.

Some key features:

1. Onboard ADC or DAC modules (or a combination of both) with galvanic isolation;
2. Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA;
3. DDR3 SODIMM memory;
4. CompactFLASH memory card;
5. Intelligent Platform Management Controller;
6. Two PCI express ×4 (generation 2) ATCA Fabric channels (dual-star topology support);
7. Eleven Xilinx Aurora ×1 (or other ATCA compatible communications protocol) ATCA Fabric channels (full-mesh topology support);
8. Two Fast Ethernet (IEEE1588-V2 and LXI compatible) ATCA Base channels (dual-star topology support);
9. Timing and Synchronization support. 

Papers in international refereed scientific journals

Conference

Posters