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Pentek Announces New SMP VxWorks Support for Feature-packed VXS I/O Processor Board

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 03:10:01 +0000

· Dual-Core Freescale 1.5 GHz 8641D PowerPC
· Fabric-transparent gigabit serial crossbar switch
· Dual optical gigabit serial transceivers
· Dual PMC/XMC mezzanine board sites
· Supports serial RapidIO, Fibre Channel, Xilinx Aurora and more
· Xilinx Virtex FPGA for custom DSP and serial protocols

Pentek, Inc., one of the pioneers of VME board-level technology, today released Wind River’s VxWorks operating system support for its Model 4207, the company’s flagship processor board for high-performance I/O and data acquisition systems. Coupling the leading real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded systems to this PowerPC and FPGA platform stems from its target applications and wide market acceptance.

The new VxWorks Board Support Package (BSP) provides software developers with a complete library of hardware-initialization, control and application functions fully compatible with Wind River’s Workbench development environment.

“VxWorks adds low-latency and deterministic real-time control of the many hardware resources and interfaces available on the Model 4207,” said Rodger Hosking, vice president, Pentek. “Engineers familiar with this proven and highly-effective operating system and Tornado development tools can boost productivity to speed application development,” he added.

The Model 4207 is uniquely designed for connectivity. The fabric-transparent, zero-latency crossbar switch connects the PowerPC, XMC module sites, the VXS connector, front-panel optical transceivers, Fibre Channel controller, and FPGA ports together using high-speed gigabit serial data paths.

Marc Ruocco, Pentek product manager explained, “The switch simply passes the gigabit serial traffic from one port to another, totally independent of any particular protocol. Multiple data streams can be sent through the switch simultaneously, even if they have different protocols. For example, the two front-panel optical ports can be connected to the Fibre Channel controller to support an 800 MB/sec VxWorks file system on an attached disk array.”
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The Model 4207 brings to designers extraordinary power, speed and connectivity in a single-slot solution, making it well suited for wideband, data acquisition and recording, real-time digital signal processing and software radio applications.

Powerful Processing
The Model 4207 is equipped with either a single-core MPC8641 or a dual-core MPC8641D executing at a maximum frequency of 1.5 GHz. These AltiVec Freescale PowerPC processors perform 128-bit parallel processing and deliver DSP floating-point processing rates of up to 12,000 GFLOPS. The processor includes built-in gigabit serial fabric support for 4x Serial RapidIO.

User-Programmable FPGA and Aurora Engine
The Model 4207 includes an optional on-board Xilinx Virtex-4 FX Series FPGA, the XC4VFX60 or XC4VFX100. Two 4X RocketIO ports provide high-speed serial paths between the FPGA and the crossbar switch for connection to other parts of the board, including the processor, VXS interface and XMC sites. A built-in Xilinx Aurora protocol engine, DMA controller and PCI-X interface simplify data transfers to and from the FPGA and two 256 MB banks of DDR2 SDRAM attached to the FPGA.

Developers can take advantage of unused FPGA resources to implement custom signal-processing algorithms with Pentek’s GateFlow FPGA Design Kit. The kit includes VHDL source files and works in conjunction with the Xilinx ISE Foundation design tools.

Compatible Hardware Products and Development Tools for a Variety of Platforms
The 4207 is compatible with any Pentek, COTS VME, VXS, PMC or XMC module–all fully supported with compatible VxWorks drivers.

Price and Availability
Pentek Model 4996A-207 VxWorks Board Support Package for Model 4207 is available immediately with prices starting at $3,000 USD. The Pentek Model 4207 pricing starts at $14,725 USD with delivery 10 to 12 weeks ARO.

About Pentek
Pentek, Inc. manufactures and markets innovative embedded systems and boards to design engineers and is a certified ISO 9001:2000 quality management company. Pentek offers powerful VME, VXS, PMC, XMC, cPCI, PCI and PCIe boards and systems for data acquisition, software radio and digital signal processing featuring Texas Instruments DSPs, Freescale PowerPCs and Xilinx FPGAs. Pentek’s I/O includes A/Ds, D/As, FPGAs, digital transceivers, installed IP cores and more. The company offers strong DSP software support and equips all products with high-performance I/O including gigabit serial interfaces.

Embedded vision system features multicore processing for multiple cameras

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:09:16 +0000

The NI EVS-1464RT embedded vision system enables building of high-speed, real-time machine-vision systems for applications such as sorting products, verifying assembly, and inspecting packaging. The system is a multicore controller capable of processing images from multiple IEEE 1394 and GigE Vision cameras. The EVS-1464RT features an extended temperature range, real-time operating system, solid-state hard drive, and fanless design, making it suitable for use in harsh industrial environments. A variety of camera connectivity options allow engineers to use many different types of cameras to perform simultaneous inspections ranging from high-resolution area-scan to high-speed linescan and from color to infrared. The system can be configured with NI Vision Builder for Automated Inspection (AI) and also can integrate with NI LabVIEW graphical system design software and the NI Vision Development Module.

National Instruments Announces New Embedded Vision System for Automated Visual Inspection

NI Embedded Vision System Increases Inspection Speed with Multicore Processing for Multiple Cameras

AUSTIN, Texas, June 9, 2009 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — National Instruments (NASDAQ:NATI) today announced the release of a new embedded vision system that gives manufacturing engineers and system integrators the ability to build high-speed real-time machine vision systems for applications such as sorting products, verifying assembly and inspecting packaging. The NI EVS-1464RTEmbedded Vision System is a high-performance, multicore controller capable of processing images from multiple IEEE 1394 and GigE Vision cameras. Additionally, the EVS-1464RT features an extended temperature range, a real-time operating system, a solid-state hard drive and a fanless design, making it ideal for use in harsh industrial environments.

“In our industrial inspection machines, we prefer embedded devices with real-time operating systems because they are dependable and often do not require IT department intervention,” said Ivan Meissner, general manager of Qualimatest Technologies. “By standardizing on the NIEmbedded Vision System, we are able to achieve the multicore performance of an industrial PC with the reliability and security of a real-time embedded system.”

Analysis: Linux versus RTOS

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 03:41:40 +0000

Linux has become well-established in the world of embedded design, but there are often reservations about its real-time performance. There are significant advantages to using Linux. A careful analysis of the real-time performance requirements of a system design can reveal whether Linux can be used or a real-time operating system is necessary.Hard and Soft Real-Time

The official definition of real-time computing is a task that is executed within a given time, giving a deterministic system. Some applications need only an average response time, while others require that every deadline is met every time.

There are two main approaches to real-time systems: “soft” real-time and “hard” real-time.

Soft real-time computing provides a guarantee of a specific level of CPU bandwidth in a specific unit of time. For example, an application that needs 10 milliseconds of CPU bandwidth and must have that requirement met within 100 milliseconds has a soft real-time requirement. This is often where a general-purpose operating system such as Linux is used.
Hard real-time computing looks at the response time rather than at a bandwidth guarantee, when an application must respond to an event within a specific time. An example would include responding to a periodic interrupt where the worst-case response time must be less than the interrupt time so that no interrupt events are lost.

Interrupt Latency

Real-time responsiveness is usually measured by the interrupt latency: the interrupt blocking time during which the kernel is pending to respond to an interrupt, saving the task context, determining the interrupt source and invoking the interrupt handler.

In reality, the interrupt latency is based on the speed of the hardware because the real variable in software is the speed of the operating system to service the interrupt with the interrupt service routine.

But with most real-time applications, before the system can respond to the interrupt, some process, task or user thread must execute and respond to the interrupt. This is called scheduling or context switch latency.

Scheduling Latency

The context switch latency is the amount of time it takes to switch control to a high-priority process in response to an event.

Part of this scheduling latency is the context switch from one process to the higher priority process, and the total real-time responsiveness is the combination of interrupt latency, scheduling and context switching.

what is rtos

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:56:20 +0000

An embedded operating system (OS) or Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) is a multitasking operating system intended for real-time applications and designed to be very compact and efficient, forsaking many functions that non-embedded computer operating systems provide. It facilitates the creation of a real-time system, but does not guarantee the final result will be real-time; this requires correct development of the software. An embedded OS or RTOS provides facilities which, if used properly, guarantee deadlines can be met generally (soft real-time) or deterministically (hard real-time). It is valued more for how quickly or predictably it can respond to a particular event than for the amount of work it can perform over a given period of time. Such applications in embedded systems include point-of-sale terminals, household appliance controllers, medical monitoring equipment and automotive controls.