Addressing the requirements of safety- and security-critical applications such as primary flight instrumentation and multi-level security systems, the Sentiris AV1 PCI Express Mezzanine Card (XMC) debuts as the first XMC to offer an obsolescence-proof design. Reportedly, this is the result of leveraging a FPGA-based video- and graphics-processing core instead of the traditional approach of employing dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs). The XMC’s hardware, the core being a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA, is programmable as an embedded GPU that is upgradeable over its lifetime. It has fully DO-254 certifiable firmware rather than taking the approach of obtaining a hardware waiver based on a statistical time test and performs with any operating system or CPU environment. In addition to DO-178B and DO-254, Sentiris AV1 meets the shock, vibration, temperature, and other requirements of MIL-STD-810F. Other features include 512 MB of DDR2 memory with ECC, dual RGB and dual HD-SDI outputs, and eight PCI Express lanes. Price starts at $9,980. QUANTUM3D INC., San Jose, CA. (888) 747-1020.
