NXMC-4E1

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. 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 NXMC-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 NXMC-4E1 therefore 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 NXMC-4E1 provides 64 MB SPI flash and 512 MB 8-bit-wide DDR3 DRAM (optional), both directly connected to the FPGA, for future use.

The NXMC-4E1 Linux driver is developed by N.A.T. and is designed to work together with Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface (DAHDI). This enables the NXMC-4E1 to 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 NXMC-4E1  and Asterisk, it is easy to integrate the NXMC-4E1 card 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.

• XMC form factor

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)

Front Panel Interfaces

• none

Backplane Connectivity

• depends on carrier board

Software

• Xilinx Vivado Lab Edition