NPCIe-XMC-4E1

The NPCIe-XMC is a half-length PCI Express (PCIe) add-in card designed as a carrier for a switched mezzanine card (XMC, ANSI/VITA 42.0-2016), to add functionality to a system with standard PCIe extension slots.

It is a non-intelligent adapter board that interfaces an XMC mezzanine module to a PCI Express bus, to route signals between the system’s PCIe bus and the XMC module. This PCIe/XMC carrier card allows a PCIe bus master to control and communicate with the hosted XMC module.

The NXMC-4E1 is a conduction cooled line interface switched mezzanine card (XMC) designed to be mounted on a suitable carrier card, such as the NPCIe-XMC. The combination of both modules is labelled NPCIe-XMC-4E1.

It is designed to process data between E1 digital data transmission formats, and PCI or PCIe interfaces. A typical application may be converting between PSTN and VOIP networks, with appropriate software.

The processing power of the NPCIe-XMC-4E1 comes from a Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA, which provides best-in-class performance-per-watt within the cost-optimized Xilinx portfolio. It features a MicroBlaze soft processor running over 200 DMIPs, an integrated ADC, and dedicated security features. The FPGA implements a PCI interface that connects the PCI bus to an internal local-bus-system. On this local-bus, these sections are memory-mapped:

• General control/status registers
• Clock/synchronization control/status block
• Access to E1-framer
• DMA engine control/status

The NPCIe-XMC-4E1therefore uses only one PCI window (size less than 1MB) mapped into the host PCI memory.

The 8-port Maxim/Dallas DS26518 E1/T1 Single-Chip Transceiver (SCT) is a framer and line interface unit that supports both long-haul and short-haul lines as each port is independently configurable.

The Broadcom/PLX ExpressLane PEX 8112 PCIe-to-PCI bridge is a high-performance bridge designed to the PCI Express-to-PCI Bridge Specification 1.0, that enables designers to migrate legacy PCI bus interfaces to the new advanced serial PCI Express. This 2-port device is equipped with a single lane PCI Express port and a parallel bus segment supporting the conventional PCI operation.

The NPCIe-XMC-4E1provides 64 MB SPI flash and 512 MB 8-bit-wide DDR3 DRAM (optional), both directly connected to the FPGA, for future use.

The NPCIe-XMC-4E1Linux driver is developed by N.A.T. and is designed to work together with Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface (DAHDI). This enables the NPCIe-XMC-4E1to interface with Asterisk and all its telephony capabilities. The software manual provides full details on how to install and use the driver, including instruction of how to set up a DAHDI installation.

Asterisk is a free and open-source framework for building communications applications. By providing an interface between the NPCIe-XMC-4E1and Asterisk, it is easy to integrate the NPCIe-XMC-4E1card into a software-defined private branch exchange (PBX) or similar use cases.

Xilinx Vivado Lab Edition is a new, compact, and standalone product targeted for use in lab environments. It provides for programming and logic/serial IO debug of all Vivado supported devices. Vivado Lab Edition requires no certificate or activation license key. The user manual provides full details on how to install this software.

• Standard height, half-length PCIe x8 add-in card with XMC mezzanine card

Processing Resources

• Xilinx Spartan-7 FPGA
• Maxim/Dallas DS26518 E1/T1 framer
• Broadcom/PLX ExpressLane PEX 8112 PCIe-to-PCI bridge
• 64 MB SPI flash and 512 MB 8-bit-wide DDR3 DRAM (optional)

Connectivity 

• 4x E1 via RJ45 towards front panel
• MicroUSB at front panel
• PCIe x8 lanes connected to XMC connector P15 as defined per ANSI-VITA 42.3

Software

• Xilinx Vivado Lab Edition