FMC+ standard propels embedded design to new heights

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Article
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June 21, 2016

FMC+ standard propels embedded design to new heights

Authored by: Jeremy Banks, Curtiss-Wright and Jim Everett, Xilinx in Vita Technologies.

The updated FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC+) specification has been developed and refined over the past year, promising unparalleled I/O density and backward compatibility. The VITA 57.4 working group has approved the spec and will present it for ANSI balloting in early 2016. The following article takes a closer look at this important new standard to see its implications for advanced embedded design.

A new mezzanine card standard called FMC+, an important development for embedded computing designs using FPGAs and high-speed I/O, will extend the total number of gigabit transceivers (GTs) in a card from 10 to 32 and increase the maximum data rate from 10 Gbps to 28 Gbps while maintaining backward compatibility with the current FMC standard.

These capabilities mesh nicely with new devices such as those using the JESD204B serial interface standard, as well as 10G and 40G fiber optics and high-speed serial memory. FMC+ addresses the most challenging I/O requirements, offering developers the best of two worlds: the flexibility of a mezzanine card with the I/O density of a monolithic design.

The mezzanine card advantage

Mezzanine cards are an effective and widely used way to add specialized functions to an embedded system. Because they attach to a base or carrier card, rather than plugging directly into a backplane, mezzanine cards can be easily changed. For system designers, this means both configuration flexibility and an easier path to technology upgrades. However, this flexibility usually comes at the cost of functionality due to either connectivity issues or the extra real estate needed to fit on the board.

For FPGAs, the primary open standard is ANSI/VITA 57.1, otherwise known as the FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) standard. A new version dubbed FMC+ (or, more formally, VITA 57.4) extends the capabilities of the current FMC standard with a major enhancement to gigabit serial interface functionality.

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What is the FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) Standard?

While CPUs rely on busses such as PCI or PCI Express, FPGAs are built to interface directly with IO devices. With this comes a set of particular IO requirements and an ANSI/VITA 57 FMC specification driven by the VITA working group.