CHATSWORTH, CA – December 23, 2010 — Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing (CWCEC), a business group of Curtiss-Wright Controls and a leading designer and manufacturer of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) VME, VPX, OpenVPX™ and CompactPCI products for the rugged deployed aerospace and defense market, has announced that it has enhanced the MFC700 OpenVPX high-density memory card with significantly increased available on-board memory. CWCEC is also pleased to announce that it has completed the rugged qualification of the conduction cooled variant of the MFC700. The rugged 6U VPX MFC700 card now provides Serial RapidIO (SRIO) host interfaces with up to 32 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM buffer memory with ECC. Both the increased memory density and the availability of fully-qualified conduction-cooled rugged variants are critical for large node High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) digital signal processing (DSP) systems.
“The MFC700 memory card enables builders of high performance radar systems to integrate large memory buffers with our high performance VPX processing solutions,” said Lynn Bamford, vice president and general manager of Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. “Increasing the MFC700’s memory density to 32 Gbytes, and completing its conduction cooled rugged qualification, are important milestones and represent a significant enhancement to CWCEC’s capability to field large HPEC systems.”
Enhanced Inter-Processor Communications
In addition, the MFC700 has also been enhanced to include support for CWCEC’s unique Interprocessor Communication (Continuum IPC) software which enables multiple MFC700s to be integrated into HPEC systems integrated based on the company’s CHAMP-AV6, 185, CHAMP-FX2 and HPE720 boards. The SDRAM memory on the MFC700 card(s) is available to and supports read/writes by all system boards via the system’s SRIO interfaces.
The Continuum IPC Library provides all the capabilities needed to control applications running on multiple processors having data movement requirements. The software hides the hardware architectural details from the application designer. For example, message passing functions send messages using the same application interface and parameters, whether the destination task resides on the same processor, same board, or any other board within the fabric. The hardware abstraction provided by Continuum IPC ensures that applications programs written for current generation processors and fabrics will be easily portable to next generation processors and fabrics.
The large contiguous memory bank provided by the MFC700’s 32 GB of SDRAM is ideal for a variety of HPEC applications that would otherwise require the dataset to be distributed across the available memory on the system’s separate processor boards.
The MFC700, the industry’s only high-density VPX memory board, also features on-board DMA controllers. This enables an application to command the MFC700 to move data around the system without ongoing processor involvement/intervention.
MFC700 Performance Features:
- Up to 32 GB high-speed DDR2 SDRAM with ECC
- Two or four FPGA-based memory controllers
- Four SRIO links to the P1 VPX connector
- Onboard 8-port SRIO switch
CWCEC’s Continuum HPEC Center of Excellence
Earlier this year, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing announced a new Continuum HPEC (High Performance Embedded Computing) Center of Excellence to assist military and aerospace customers in the solution mapping, architecture, and validation of large node digital signal processing (DSP) clusters which include heterogeneous combinations of FPGA and CPU processing elements, A/D & D/A, IO, interconnects, fabrics, middleware and libraries. Targeting RADAR, SIGINT, EW and communications applications, this multi-node system initiative will speed the integration of open standards-based sensor processing systems, lowering the risk of future technology insertions. Continuum HPEC systems will scale and grow, leveraging the continuous innovation in each of CWCEC’s modular product families. The Continuum HPEC Center of Excellence will be based in CWCEC’s Chatsworth, California business unit.
Extensive Software Support
Software support for the MFC700 includes device drivers for the Wind River® VxWorks® 6.x and Wind River® Linux® 2.6.x operating environments.
For more information on the MFC700, please visit http://www.cwembedded.com.
Editorial inquiries: regarding Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing products or services, contact John Wranovics, public relations director, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, Tel: (925) 640-6402; email. jwranovics@curtisswright.com.
Inquiries: Please forward all Sales and reader service inquiries to Jerri-Lynne Charbonneau, Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, Tel: (613) 254-5112; Fax: (613) 599-7777; e-mail: sales@cwcembedded.com.
Pricing for the MFC700 starts at $39,775.00. Availability is immediate.
About Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing is the industry’s most comprehensive and experienced single source for embedded solutions, ranging from Processing, Subsystems, Data Communication, DSP, and Video & Graphics to the most advanced board level components and fully integrated custom systems. The Embedded Computing group serves the defense, aerospace, commercial and industrial markets and is part of Curtiss-Wright Controls Inc.
About Curtiss-Wright Controls, Inc.
Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Curtiss-Wright Controls is the motion control segment of Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW). With manufacturing facilities around the world, Curtiss-Wright Controls is a leading technology-based organization providing niche motion control products, subsystems and services internationally for the aerospace and defense markets. For more information, visit http://www.cwcontrols.com/.
