South African electronics company Etion Create, part of the Reunert Group, has upgraded its VF360 3U OpenVPX single-board computer module. The company says its VF365 module leverages Intel Arria 10 system-on-chip array (SoC) field-programmable gate (FPGA) and Texas Instruments KeyStone multicore digital signal processing (DSP) technology.

“The VF365 is essentially a midlife upgrade, serving as a drop-in replacement for the trusted VF360 module, offering more performance with lower power consumption at a lower cost,” explains Etion Create product manager Piet du Toit. “It is an ultra-high bandwidth processing platform, ideally suited for computation and bandwidth intensive applications such as radar, signals intelligence (SIGINT), electronic warfare (EW), software-defined radio (SDR), networking and video.”

Du Toit points out that the Arria 10 SoC high-performance FPGA fabric provides
logic, internal memory and floating-point DSP resources for demanding applications in the defence, industrial and energy markets.

The combination of the multicore floating-point DSP processor and the FPGA’s hard processor system (HPS) with dual-core advanced RISC machine (ARM) cortex-A9 MPCore processor is designed to provide flexible software options for both control and high-performance processing type applications, tightly coupled to the FPGA through peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe), serial rapidIO (SRIO) and high-bandwidth advanced extensible iInterface (AXI) bridges.

When populated with Etion Create or third party FPGA mezzanine cards (FMC), the VF365 provides a platform with high bandwidth I/O options in different application fields through the industry standard VITA 57 connector.

The company notes that the new module that is likely to interest international military customers is an embedded board used in defence electronics systems and subsystems, such as radar, to generate, receive and process complex radar signals and EW to intercept and control the jamming of signals in the spectrum.