Feb 04. Radstone Technology announces the Cardbridge PC Card (PCMCIA) carrier. A rugged CompactPCI PC Card carrier, Cardbridge brings pluggable PC Card functionality to space efficient rugged 3U CompactPCI architectures. Cardbridge is the only 3U CompactPCI PC Card carrier available in a range of ruggedization levels from commercial grade through to rugged air-conduction-cooled. Unique to the design, is the ability to fit a Compact FLASH module directly onto the PCB. This is essential in rugged applications and offers up to 3 GBytes of rugged storage with today’s technology. Cardbridge is designed to complement Radstone’s range of 3U CompactPCI products including the RT4 PowerPact™ system which is available with a gasketed front door to allow PC Cards to be inserted and removed. This is particularly applicable when the RT4 Power Pact is used in a data logging application or when PC Cards are used to provide a standardized data interchange mechanism.
Feb 04. Dy 4 Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW;CW.B), introduced the CHAMP- FX to bring the power of FPGA-based processing to its CHAMP line of high-density processing solutions. The CHAMP-FX is a 6U VME form-factor board designed around a pair of Xilinx Virtex-II Pro? FPGAs as the core engines. It provides a balanced architecture with high-bandwidth memory and I/O subsystems to effectively harness the computational power of the Virtex-II Pro?. Each FPGA is fitted with 256MB of DDR SDRAM and 8MB of DDRII SRAM that together provide more than 8Gbyte/s of memory bandwidth. Algorithms needing intermediate storage benefit from the fast SRAM, while the large SDRAM is often needed for input and output data buffers. Both memories can serve application code running on the hardwired PowerPC of the Virtex II Pro.