High density, Flash Memory PMC provides sustained data transfers

Citation

(2008), "High density, Flash Memory PMC provides sustained data transfers", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 80 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2008.12780aad.015

High density, Flash Memory PMC provides sustained data transfers

High density, Flash Memory PMC provides sustained data transfers

Aitech Defense Systems, Inc., a large independent manufacturer of open architecture board and subsystem level products for harsh environment defense, aerospace and astronautics applications, has upgraded its high density M222 PMC to provide reported sustained data transfer rates of over 130MB/s via FPGA-based DMA controllers. The board consumes less than 7W of power and incorporates up to 64GB of NAND Flash memory in two independent banks with integrated DMAC.

Designed for high-speed read, write and erase performance, the M222 is said to be suitable for high density, local data storage applications such as detailed tactical area maps, large databases, compressed storage of radar or sonar images and software programmable radio ELINT data or other graphics.

An optimised Aitech FMM software package is optionally available and automatically treats the Flash memory as the system's disk drive under the operating system to provide real-time operating system support.

Automatic wear levelling in the FMM driver package ensures that write-erase cycles are uniformly balanced across the entire device to eliminate excessive wear from repeated write-erase cycles to any individual block.

The M222 provides full file system read/write emulation, automatic block management, and interleaved DMA memory accesses of up to 32 memory banks for high performance. The onboard FPGA-based Flash DMA controller provides “write ahead” buffers for write/erase operations, substantially increasing data throughput, performance and flexibility.

The new Flash memory PMC comes in forced air-cooled and standard ANSI/VITA 20 conduction-cooled mechanical formats as well as in commercial, rugged and military grade configurations. All boards feature metal thermal frames for excellent rigidity and shock resistance for trouble-free performance, even in high-stress military environments. Thermal heatsinks on the M222 combine to allow optimal heat transfer to the enclosure's sidewalls. The single-slot PMC module connects to, and takes all of its power from, the CompactPCI, VMEbus or PCI base board.