Fiber-Optic Host Bus Adapter streams a gigabyte per second

AFHBA404 : now shipping, fiber optic Host Bus Adapter card.

• PCI-Express card with
• 4 x SFP+ Sockets
• PCI-Express Gen2 x4 bus interface
• Firmware implements 4 x 6 Gbps data links.

The D‑TACQ ACQ2106 digitizer appliance can capture huge amounts of data for example

• ACQ2106+6xACQ424ELF32-1000 : 192 channels, 1 MSPS : 384 MBytes/s
• ACQ2106+6xACQ480ELF-8-50 : 48 channels, 20 MSPS : 1920 MBytes/s

ACQ2106 features SFP+ fiber optic transceivers. AFHBA404 forms the "ground station" for the link, with matching SFP+ links and a high performance DMA engine to stream the data direct to DRAM on host PC. Each 6 Gbps link can transfer 500 MBytes/s, and multiple links can be aggregated to increase data rate. D‑TACQ has tested aggregation to 1 GBytes/s.

With 4 ports, AFHBA404 can aggregate data from multiple separate ACQ2106 boxes. The system is also capable of extreme low-latency multi-channel operation, used in demanding control applications.

AFHBA404 is represents a significant upgrade on our previous AFHBA product (single port, 2.5Gbps), however AFHBA is still available for single box applications where the data rate (200 MBytes/sec) is sufficient.

notes:

Gbps: communication link rate: Giga Bit per second, raw 8b/10b encoding.
MBytes/s : Data flow, mega bytes/second.
MSPS : Mega Samples Per Second, with D‑TACQ products, all samples are simultaneous.
Actual achievable throughput depends on choice of host PC.