ATX motherboard hosts Virtex-4 development

Xilinx has announced immediate availability of its lead-free, RoHS compliant ML410 development platform.

Xilinx has announced immediate availability of its lead-free, RoHS compliant ML410 development platform.

Based on the Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA, the ML410 provides designers with a high performance logic fabric, two embedded PowerPC 405 processors and a considerable quantity of high-speed serial I/O with integrated transceivers.

When paired with the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) and extensive catalogue of IP peripherals, the ML410 platform provides a comprehensive embedded development system that enables rapid prototyping and verification of embedded system designs.

Offered as an ATX form-factor motherboard, the development platform includes a 256Mbyte DDR-II DIMM memory, a 64Mbyte DDR component memory, PCI Express and PCI 32/33 expansion connectors, two 10/100/1000 Ethernet PHYs, and interface ports for USB, Serial ATA, PS/2 keyboard/mouse and RS232.

With individual DDR-II and DDR memories onboard, the ML410 provides an ideal development platform for prototyping and verifying high throughput data intensive applications.

An embedded system designer can create high performance platforms as required by many communications, medical imaging and streaming video applications by building systems using either the Xilinx XPS EDK-based memory controllers or the configurable multiported memory controller (MPMC2).

The MPMC2, available as a free downloadable reference design, has integrated DMA, allows point to point connections, and can be integrated with EDK IP cores.

"By using the ML410 evaluationboard from Xilinx, and leveraging the MPMC2/DDR2 RDIMM and TEMAC reference design, we were able to accelerate the design, debug and troubleshoot steps for our PPC405 embedded system implemented on Xilinx Virtex-4 FX100 FPGA platform", stated Dr XiaoLei Guo, Principal Development Engineer, C-Cor.

C-Cor is a leading provider of advanced video, voice and data transport technology along with sophisticated software systems for the monitoring and management needed to deploy and support everything from basic video to Internet telephony, video-on-demand and switched-digital-broadcast.

Leveraging both integrated PowerPC 405 cores in the Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA, the ML410 is architected to allow two independent processing systems on a single platform.

This capability is exemplified by an FPGA design created with dual independent processor subsystems, each running the VxWorks and using independent Ethernet channels that operate at 10/100 or 1000Mbit/s.

Expansion connectors provide further customisation.

Using the connectors to interface a custom designed daughter card, an additional eight transceivers and multiple LVDS pairs can be accessed.

According to the May 2006 Embedded Market Forecasters Survey of Embedded Developers, respondents overwhelmingly selected Xilinx as the FPGA vendor with which they were most familiar, currently using products from, shipping a product with, and planning to use in their next embedded design.

The ML410 development platform includes a comprehensive library of documentation, reference designs, tutorials, source code, board schematics, and more.

The ML410 is available for immediate delivery at US $2995.

Orders can be placed through Xilinx distributors or direct on the Xilinx website.

A 19in 1U rack-mount chassis is available for an additional $449.

Intended to be installed into a four-post network rack for remote use, the rack-mount chassis can be used to set up a farm of ML410s for regression testing or for creating a networked computing cluster.

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