Pentek

Pentek is the leading board and system manufacturer offering COTS and ruggedized products in formats such as VPX, PMC/XMC, PCI Express, AMC, FMC, CompactPCI, and PCI, featuring the latest Xilinx Virtex and Kintex FPGAs. Pentek’s data acquisition line is extensive and includes A/Ds, D/As, Digital Receivers/ Transmitters, Digital I/O, Analog RF downconverters, High-speed recorders, Development systems and more. No other embedded vendor can provide such seasoned, in-depth technical expertise in data acquisition, digital signal processing and software-defined radio. with Pentek products you can select from the industry’s most extensive line of advanced analog and digital I/O products, along with exclusive development tools that help you create a custom system. Many of these products include Xilinx Virtex or Kintex FPGAs for customized processing.
High-Speed Real-Time Recording Systems
 ■ Economical alternatives to in-house development
■ Fully tested and ready to run right out-of-the-box
■ Easy to use with full-featured software installed Processor Engines
■ Xilinx Virtex and Kintex FPGAs
Data Acquisition
■ Single or multichannel A/Ds and D/As
■ Sampling rates to 3.6 GHz
■ Resolution to 24 bits
Software Radio
■ Up to 1100 channels per slot
■ Narrow-, wide- and multi-band versions
■ Digital downconverters and upconverters
■ Analog downconverters
■ Development systems.

Product overview:

As FPGAs acquired DSP capabilities with hardware multipliers, Pentek was among the first to offer board-level FPGA design kits so customers could easily add their own IP algorithms. Pushing the envelope of FPGA resources, Pentek announced a series of extremely high-performance FPGA cores for FFT, DDC and pulse compression algorithms and now offer these as installed IP cores on Pentek products.

Development Tools and Software Support

Navigator™ Design Suite takes a new approach to solving FPGA IP and control software connectivity. Most modern FPGA-processing applications require development of specialized FPGA IP to run on the hardware, and software to control the FPGA hardware from a host computer. Even when “turnkey” solutions are delivered with complete FPGA IP and software libraries, as developers add their own custom-processing IP, new software needs to be created to control the custom IP functions.

Navigator™ FDK (FPGA Design Kit) provides the complete IP for a specific RFSoC data acquisition and processing board. When the design is opened in Vivado’s IP Integrator, the developer can access every component of the Pentek design, replacing or modifying blocks as needed for the application. All blocks use industry standard AXI4 interfaces providing a well-defined format for custom IP to connect to the rest of the design. Each Navigator/RFSoC design includes User Blocks in the data-flow path, ideal for inserting custom processing IP.

Navigator™ BSP (Board Support Package) allows software developers to work at a higher level, abstracting many of the details of the hardware through an intuitive API. The API allows developers to focus on the task of creating the application by letting the API, the hardware and IP-control libraries below it to handle many of the board-specific functions. Developers who want full access to the entire BSP library, enjoy complete C-language source code as well as full documentation.

While many applications can be satisfied with the board’s built-in functions, the FMC carrier boards are an ideal development and deployment platform for custom IP. Supported by GateFlow® FPGA Design Resources, users have access to the complete factory-installed IP at the source level, allowing them to extend or even replace the built in functions.

The Pentek ReadyFlow® Board Support Package is available for Windows and Linux operating systems. To accelerate application development, ReadyFlow is provided as a C-callable library, the complete suite of initialization, control and status functions, as well as a rich set of precompiled, ready-to-run-examples.

The Pentek GateXpress® PCIe Configuration Manager supports dynamic FPGA reconfiguration through software commands as part of the runtime application. This provides an efficient way to quickly reload the FPGA, which occurs many times during development. For deployed environments, GateXpress enables reloading the FPGA without the need to reset the host system, ideal for applications that require dynamic access to multiple processing IP algorithms.

Development Systems

The SPARK® Development Systems were created to save engineers and system integrators the time and expense associated with building and testing a development system. Each SPARK system is delivered with the Pentek board(s) and required software installed and equipped with sufficient cooling and power to ensure optimum performance.The SPARK systems are fully-integrated platforms for Pentek’s board(s) in product families:

  • Quartz™ (Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC)
  • Jade™ (Xilinx Kintex UltraScale)
  • Flexor® (FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card))
  • JadeFX™ (Xilinx Kintex UltraScale with FMC)
  • Onyx® (Xilinx Virtex-7)
  • OnyxFX™ (Xilinx Virtex-7 with FMC)
  • Cobalt® (Xilinx Virtex-7)

Quartz Family of Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC Products

The Quartz™ Xilinx Zynq® UltraScale+ RFSoC series integrate multi-giga-sample RF data converters and soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) into an All Programmable SoC architecture. Complete with an ARM® Cortex™-A53 processing subsystem, UltraScale+ programmable logic, and the highest signal processing bandwidth in a Zynq UltraScale+ device, the new family provides a comprehensive RF signal chain for wireless, cable access, test & measurement, early warning / radar, and other high performance RF applications.

Jade Family of Xilinx Kintex UltraScale FPGA Products

The Jade™ series is more an evolution of our Cobalt® and Onyx® product families than a completely new product. All of the best features and proven analog interfaces have been designed into Jade and we streamlined the architecture to lower cost and power.

The JadeFX™ family of Xilinx Kintex UltraScale products uses the latest Xilinx FPGA technology and FMC products to provide customers additional processing engines with the lowest power to address the insatiable demand of higher-speed A/Ds and D/As and tougher DSP algorithms.

Onyx Family of Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA Products

The Onyx®, Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA family uses the latest Xilinx FPGA technology to provide customers additional processing engines with the lowest power to address the insatiable demand of higher-speed A/Ds and D/As and tougher DSP algorithms. The Onyx modules use the same modular I/O interfaces as the popular Cobalt® family Virtex-6 FPGA, while boosting memory, logic and I/O performance.

OnyxFX Family of Xilinx Virtex-7 FMC Products

The OnyxFX™, Virtex-7 FPGA family uses the latest Xilinx FPGA technology and FMC modules to provide customers additional processing engines with the lowest power to address the insatiable demand of higher-speed A/Ds and D/As and tougher DSP algorithms.

Cobalt Family of Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA Products\

Pentek’s Cobalt® family of Xilinx Virtex-6 products provide the most advanced features in the FPGA market. In addition to the high-performance logic fabric, Virtex-6 FPGAs contain many built-in system-level blocks.These features allow logic designers to build the highest levels of performance and functionality into their FPGA-based systems.