A dozen SHARCs yield 7.2 Gflops in a single VME slot

-- EDN, 1/6/2000

Radar, sonar, and medical imaging are target applications for a new real-time multiprocessing board from Spectrum Signal Processing. The Modena-VME board sports 12 of the recently announced ADSP-21160 SHARC DSP processors from Analog Devices (www.analogdevices.com) in a single 6U VME slot. Each DSP processor provides 600 Mflops of computational power, resulting in a full-board processing density of 7.2 Gflops.

The Modena-VME board offers users a high-power, off-the-shelf upgrade while preserving legacy application software. The ADSP-21160 is code-compatible with previous-generation ADSP-2106x SHARC DSPs.

The ADSP-21160 DSP also includes on-chip link ports to enable high-speed chip-to-chip and board-to-board communications similar to the switched-fabric architectures that Mercury Computer Systems (www.mc.com) and Sky Computers (www.sky.com) pioneered. The 12 onboard DSPs provide an effective interprocessor communications bandwidth of 7.2 Gbytes/sec on one VME board.

The Modena-VME board quantity pricing starts at $15,999, and it will be available this month.

Spectrum Signal Processing, 1-602-421-5422, www.spectrumsignal.com.

-by Warren Webb