HPAPB - Stratix V

Ultra-High Performance Stratix V Signal Acquisition (JESD204B), Signal Processing, and Communication board.

This industrial board combines 8 x ADC channels (14 bits - 250 Ms/s - JESD204B) with the huge processing power of the largest Stratix V FPGA (for signal processing applications). HPAPB has been designed to be used in a synchronized array built on a 40Gbits/s communication ring. An industrial rack, capable of hosting up to 10 boards (for a total of 80 ADC channels), is also available as an option.

HPAPB Stratix V board

Introduction

This industrial Signal Acquisition and Processing board has been designed for :

  • Acquiring eight analog channels synchronously (JESD204B) at very high speed (up to 250 Ms/s),
  • Implementing very dense and complex signal processing in the biggest and fastest Stratix V FPGA from Altera (now Intel) connected to two very fast DDR3 memory modules.
  • Offering a huge communication bandwidth with neighbor HPAPBs, and with the external world (like GPU arrays etc)

Feature-rich With up to 32 Gigabytes of on-board DDR3 memory (2 slots), 2 x 10G SFP+ slots for 10G Ethernet (eg), and one Gigabit Ethernet port (for control and “low speed” transfers), HPAPB offers unprecedented computing power and communication throughput. An on-board USB-Blaster II is included (with extra debug port feature for high data transfer speed). The external 10 MHz Reference Clock input associated with the PPS input allow extremely accurate (ns) absolute time-stamping, perfect ADC synchronization, as well as multi-boards synchronization. Moreover, it has been designed to communicate at very high speed (2 x 40 Gbits/s QSFP+) with neighbor cards (or other equipment), thus allowing cross-computation over an extremely large number of channels (for multiple synthetic aperture, beam-forming, sub-band analysis etc).

Use Example

For example, HPAPB has been used successfully in a radio-astronomy application with 192 channels acquired and processed simultaneously. An industrial rack, capable of hosting up to 10 x boards, is available upon request (see picture below). With close to 4,000 internal multipliers, the Stratix V GSD8 FPGA (largest device available) provides huge signal processing power (up to 1000 billions of multiplications per second !). With 2 x 40G + 2 x 10G = over 100 Gigabits per second for communication throughput, HPAPB can move data between boards or with other processing systems at incredible rates, using standard low-cost cables up to several meters, or optical (fiber) adapters for longer connections.

ALSE Framework and IPs

To help customers take the best advantage of the board’s and FPGA’s performance, A.L.S.E has developed specific IPs and a very powerful and versatile framework, from ADC data acquisition, to PLLs and synchronization control, to remote firmware update (with management of multiple configurations) through Ethernet, 10G Ethernet communication through hardware stack (10GEDEK), and many more.

You can see the details in the HPAPB Datasheet.

Document download

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