200 MBPS TO 1 GBPS DATA ACQUISITION & CAPTURE USING RACEWAY

Abstract

For many years VME has been the platform of choice for high-performance, real-time data acquisition systems. VME’s longevity has been made possible in part by timely enhancements which have expanded system bandwidth and allowed systems to support ever increasing throughput. One of the most recent ANSI-standard extensions of the VME specification defines RACEway, a system of dynamically switched, 160 Mbyte/second board-to-board interconnects. In typical systems RACEway increases the internal bandwidth of a VME system by an order of magnitude. Since this bandwidth is both scaleable and deterministic, it is particularly well suited to high-performance, real-time systems. The potential of RACEway for very high-performance (200 Mbps to 1 Gbps) real-time systems has been recognized by both the VME industry and a growing number of system integrators. This recognition has yielded many new RACEway-ready VME products from more than a dozen vendors. In fact many significant real-time data acquisition systems that consist entirely of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) RACEway products are being developed and fielded today. This paper provides an overview of RACEway technology, identifies the types of RACEway equipment currently available, discusses how RACEway can be applied in high-performance data acquisition systems, and briefly describes two systems that acquiring and capturing real-time data streams at rates from 200 Mbps to 1 Gbps using RACEway.