| Ultra-Wideband Recording Stretches to Keep Up With Digitizers |
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| Nov 01 2007 | |
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advertisement: More Recording Horsepower Recording engines generally grab data from a source and tag and format it for a mass storage device. Since digitized data is readily placed on serial FPDP links, recording engines based on quad serial FPDP inputs are called for. While serial FPDP has advantages, it’s not the only interface out there. With that in mind, the latest recording engines have been designed to interface to a wider range of data sources by basing their inputs on PMCs, such that the I/O capability can be changed to meet the mission and scaled as technology advances. Using the latest generation quad serial FPDP PMC such as the VMETRO SFM, a single recording engine can handle four of the striped data channels from the digitizer. Bumping the interface from PMC to XMC increases the available I/O bandwidth into the recorder engine even farther. Once the data is onboard, fast onboard processing using a Power Architecture processor augmented by an FPGA performs the tagging and formatting functions to prepare data to move into the storage area network (SAN).Today’s fourth generation recording engine technology, such as the VMETRO M6000, is using XMCs with x8 PCI Express interfaces coupled with the high performance onboard processing, and has moved the bar for streaming real-time performance from around 90 MB/sec a few years ago to a current figure of 720 MB/sec. These recorders also feature GigE interfaces to facilitate management tasks. |
