Advantech System-On-Modules/COM Express featuring Intel® Core™ Duo

System On Module (SOM) is a series of reliable and widely used CPU cores with high integration features, whereby developers only have to design the customer solution board (CSB). Not only does SOM allow quick design, it also provides the benefits of easy installation, maintenance and upgrading.

Contact for more info: ecginfo@advantech.com, 800-866-6008.

The PCI Sig® announced in mid-January the PCI Express Base 2.0 specification,, which doubles the interconnect bit rate from 2.5GT/s to 5GT/s to support high-bandwidth applications. (Announcement, here). Whatever version your application may use, PCIe provides a forward path to amazing bandwidth. Consider, for example, GiDEL, a company helping OEM's to bring to market new intense high-bandwidth applications in the military, vision, medical and other verticals. GiDEL has a new product group, PROCe. It provides FPGA-based platforms for high-speed data acquisition systems, vision systems, DSP applications and powerful reconfigurable computing. The products also have a cool software development kkit, PROC_HILs (hardware-in-the-loop), which includes software for taking models, built with MathWorks HDL Coder, Synplicity's Synplify DSP or Altera's DSP Builder. Push a single button and you can map and synthesize the design, and create the programming bit stream for the hardware. The software also creates a hardware-in-the-loop S-model for Simulink so that it can fully replace a Simulink software model. PROCe aims to eliminate the need for algorithm developers and software engineers to have to learn hardware description languages, synthesis tools and FPGA technology to speed up algorithm development. Check it out, here.

Another company that has not only embraced PCIe, but come out with a specific product to make the transition easy is Carlo Gavazzi Computing Solutions. That company announced its XP-9E PCI expansion system, which is a 4U rackmount enclosure that accommodates eight full-length, full-height PCI cards and integrates seamlessly into the PCI Express bus of new application servers that do not provide support for full-size or low profile PCI cards. The XP-9E provides 8 full size PCI 2.3-compliant slots and one PCIe x4 slot to support the applications PCI and PCI Express cards. Announcement, here

The transition to high-speed busses like PCI Express, Serial ATA, or Gigabit Ethernet comes at a cost of increasing challenges to signal integrity. One theme at the recent DesignCon in Santa Clara was better signal integrity testing tools. One of the leading companies in this domain is LeCroy Corporation. In December, that company introduced its Gen2 PCI Express Link Trainer, the companion development tool for the earlier PCI Express PETracer™ Gen2 Summit Analyzer. The product aims to help companies developing PCI Express Gen2 products that need a controllable host or device running at 5 Gb/s speeds. It is a card-based LTSSM exerciser that can generate training sequences at Gen1/Gen2 speeds for lane widths from x1 to x16. Details here.

At DesignCon, the company introduced Eye Doctor, a digital oscilloscope (DSO)-based instrumentation and co-simulation system that specifically addresses the challenges of analyzing serial data created by the increase of systems' symbol rates and adoption of receiver equalization. Eye Doctor is the first system that combines the signal acquisition power of a DSO with sophisticated digital signal processing (DSP) for digital filter synthesis and simulation. The product provides tools to undo or compensate for common forms of distortion, resulting in increased signal-to-noise, opened eyes, increased rise time, and reduced jitter. It also restores lost bandwidth and improves waveform fidelity. Eye Doctor achieves this improved analysis capability, in part, because it incorporates two unique elements - Virtual Probing™, which enhances the accuracy of measurements made on distorted waveforms, and equalized receiver emulation, which allows measurements to be made from a "receiver's eye view." Details here.