BittWare’s A10PED is a full-length PCIe x8 card featuring two Intel Arria 10 GX FPGAs. The Arria 10 boasts high densities and a power-efficient FPGA fabric married with a rich feature set including high-speed transceivers up to 15 Gbps, hard floating-point DSP blocks, and embedded Gen3 PCIe x8. The board offers flexible memory configurations, supporting a Hybrid Memory Cube along with up to 32 GBytes of memory. Two 12x Avago fiber optic modules and a QSFP cage provide high-speed, low-latency I/O direct to the FPGAs. The A10PED also incorporates a Board Management Controller (BMC) for advanced system monitoring, which greatly simplifies platform management.All of these features combine to make the A10P3S ideal for a wide range of applications, including network processing, cyber security, compute and storage, instrumentation, broadcast, and Signals Intelligence.
Built on 20 nm process technology, the Arria 10 FPGAs feature industry-leading programmable logic that integrates a rich feature set of embedded peripherals, embedded high-speed transceivers, hard memory controllers, and protocol IP controllers. Variable-precision digital signal processing (DSP) blocks integrated with hardened floating point (IEEE 754-compliant) enable the Arria 10 to deliver floating-point performance of up to 1.5 TFLOPS. The FPGA supports Gen3 PCIe x8 via a hard IP block and provides up to 1150K equivalent LEs.
Development tools for OpenCL include Altera’s SDK for OpenCL and BittWare’s OpenCL Developer’s Bundle.
Dual Arria 10 GX Full-Length PCIe Board with Dual 12x Avago Fiber Optic, QSFP, and HMC
2x Intel Arria 10 GX FPGAs
2x PCIe x8 interfaces supporting Gen1, Gen2, or Gen3
2x 12x Avago fiber optic modules
QSFP cage for 4x 10GigE
Board Management Controller for Intelligent Platform Management
Utility I/O: USB 2.0, SATA, powered GPIO header
Memory options:
up to 2 GB Hybrid Memory Cube
up to 32 GBytes of DDR4 SDRAM with ECC
High-Speed Networking and I/O
The A10PED provides a variety of interfaces for high-speed serial I/O as well as debug support. Two 12x Avago fiber optic modules are on the front panel, supporting high-density, high-speed optical interconnects. A QSFP cage is also available on the front panel, supporting four 10GigE channels. The Avago and QSFP SerDes channels are connected directly to the Arria 10 FPGAs, thus removing the latency of external PHYs. The QSFP cage can optionally be adapted for SFP+.
Several additional interfaces also support high-speed I/O. Two Gen3 x8 PCIe interfaces connect to the FPGAs via 16 SerDes lanes, allowing for a x8 PCIe connection (to FPGA A) in a standard slot or two x8 interfaces (one to each FPGA)in a bifurcated slot. Two SerDes lanes are available via SATA connectors to connect external storage devices or provide direct board-to-board communication.
A USB 2.0 interface provides debug and programming support. The USB features a built-in Intel USB-Blaster and is connected to the Board Management Controller. The board also provides an on-board powered GPIO header.
Memory
The A10PED features four SODIMM sites, each supporting up to 8 GBytes of DDR4 with optional error-correcting codes (ECC). A Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) provides high-performance serial memory. Additional on-board memory includes flash with factory default and support for multiple FPGA images.
Board Management Controller
This boards‘s advanced system monitoring subsystem features a Board Management Controller (BMC), which accepts Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) messaging protocol commands.
The BMC features include control of power and resets, monitoring of board sensors, FPGA boot loader, voltage overrides, configuration of programmable clocks, access to I2C bus components, field upgrades, and IPMI messaging.
Access to the BMC is via PCIe or USB. BittWare’s BittWorks II Toolkit also provides utilities and libraries for communicating with the BMC components at a higher, more abstract level, allowing developers to remotely monitor the state of the board.
BittWorks II Toolkit
BittWare offers complete software support for this card with its BittWorks II software tools. The BittWorks II Toolkit serves as the main interface between the BittWare board and the host system. The Toolkit includes drivers, libraries, utilities, and example projects for accessing, integrating, and developing applications for the BittWare board.
FPGA Development Kit
BittWare’s FPGA DevKit provides FPGA board support IP and integration for BittWare’s Altera FPGA-based boards. The FDK includes FPGA components that provide preconfigured physical interfaces, infrastructure, and examples, drastically cutting development time and easily integrating into existing FPGA development environments.
Working example projects are available for each board which illustrate how to move data between the board’s different interfaces. Supported interfaces include DDR4, DDR3, DDR2, QDR2/+, PCIe, 10GbE, LVDS, SerDes, and Double Data Rate I/O. All example projects are available on BittWare’s Developer Site.
BittWare Firmware and Network Solutions Partners
BittWare offers firmware for the Arria 10 FPGA on the A10 family PCIe boards, targeted specifically for networking applications. BittWare’s FPGA framework provides a solid base for your application, including the following:
10GbE MAC
PCIe multi-channel DMA engines
DDR4 SDRAM and QDRII/II+ controllers
BittWare has also partnered with several companies to offer solutions for networking and financial acceleration:
Algo-Logic: Market feed handler and low latency gateway libraries, MAC, TOE
Argon Design: Design services specializing in multimedia and FPGA-based high performance trading
Atomic Rules: Custom IP development, example UDP, precision timestamping, PCIe, networking
Enyx: UOE, TOE, book building IP, order management IP, Market Feed Handler
A10PED is a full-length, standard-height, double-wide PCIe x8 card featuring 2x Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA cards.BwMonitor is a part of the BittWorks II Toolkit: provides live board power and temperature display of BittWare hardware.
