OREANDA-NEWS. May 2, 2012.  GE Intelligent Platforms (NYSE: GE) today announced the SPR507B 4-Channel serial FPDP interface PMC/XMC module. Designed for high speed remote data transfer at the industry’s fastest rates – in applications, for example, where the input from multiple sensors, such as in radar or sonar, is to be gathered for back-end processing – it can allow valuable chassis slots to be saved, resulting in smaller and lighter solutions.

Available as either a PMC module for legacy systems or as an XMC module for more recent systems, the SPR507B uses a Xilinx™ Virtex®-6 FPGA to help it deliver up to 4.25 Gbaud per link, or a total bandwidth across its four ports of around 1.4 Gigabytes/second. It also benefits from GE’s extensive experience in thermal management and ruggedization, allowing it to be more easily deployed in confined spaces where cooling can be a challenge and where the environment is subject to extremes of heat, shock, vibration and so on.

The low latency protocol used in serial FPDP and the noise immunity of the fibre-based data transport is the ideal combination for applications which require a dedicated data link to run between sources of data, such as a high speed digitizer, to a remote data processing station. The SPR507B allows for fibre lengths up to 10km in length with the choice of single mode fibre.

“We believe the SPR507B delivers a transfer rate that is 30% faster than the industry standard, making it a compelling option for those customers for whom speed is of the essence,” said Dan Veenstra, Product Manager, GE Intelligent Platforms. “However, the SPR507B isn’t just about delivering the industry’s highest performance. It’s about its flexibility, ease of use and SWaP characteristics - and GE’s ability to help our customers reduce program risk, and minimize long term cost of ownership.”

The flexible architecture of the SPR507B allows for each fibre link to be configured independently, providing for multiple baud rates to be simultaneously supported. Each link can operate in either direction.

The SPR507B includes 1 GByte of high speed on-board storage in a FIFO (individual per channel) configuration. The FIFO is programmable in depth, allowing an application to fine tune system latencies to achieve optimal performance.

Another benefit of the SPR507B design is the ability to update the serial FPDP implementation at some point in the future. Since the SPR507B is built around a central FPGA, future updates to the sFPDP specification can be implemented as a firmware update, such as the VITA17.2 specification (currently in draft) which allows for key additional features such as channel bonding.