Orange Tree Technologies, a UK-based company, has launched a high-performance Gigabit Ethernet FPGA module, the ZestET2-NJ. Comprising Gigabit Ethernet processing engine, Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, DDR3 memory and general purpose I/O, it is aimed at data acquisition and control applications in markets such as industrial vision, radar, sonar and medical imaging.
The compact ZestET2-NJ delivers the maximum sustained Ethernet bandwidth of over 100MB/s in both directions simultaneously, making it ideal for high bandwidth data acquisition and control applications.
The User FPGA is the Xilinx Artix-7 XC7A35T with more than 33,000 logic cells, 1.8Mb of Block RAM and 90 DSP slices. It is tightly coupled with 512MB of 400MHz DDR3 SDRAM, giving it an ample memory bandwidth of 1.6GB/s for high-speed processing and formatting of streaming data. With ease of integration in mind, there are 105 FPGA IO pins available for connection to the user's equipment.
Now in its third generation, Orange Tree's proprietary GigEx chip handles all the Ethernet protocols and adds an internal user programmable Sparc-compatible CPU, which can be used to implement higher level Ethernet protocols such as GigE Vision. Sparc programming tools are supplied free with the module. Alternatively, this CPU can be left unprogrammed and GigEx will then handle the standard Ethernet protocols.
The TCP/IP engine in GigEx runs at 10/100/1000 Mb/s and implements the following protocols: TCP/IP, UDP, ARP, IPv4, ICMP, IGMP, PTP and HTTP. For real-time applications, Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and SyncE offer time of day and a 125MHz clock synchronised across the network to other network devices.
