The FMC standard may seem similar to other mezzanine card formats, like PMC or XMC, but it’s not. Put an XMC card on an XMC site and you can generally assume it will work; not so for an FMC card on an FMC site. The FMC standard has huge advantages in terms of I/O throughput and flexibility but matching an FMC card with a carrier has to be done carefully.
It’s kind of like building a team for World Cup Football. You want to build the best possible team for international competition and to do that you must be able to choose from a wide pool of players, coming from many different clubs. But highly skilled players are not enough; you need to understand the individual players and all the details; their strengths and weaknesses and when to use them. Get it right and you will achieve great results. Get it wrong and you’ll be history.
Parallels can be drawn with the FMC mix and match format. Get it right and you’ll achieve a high-performance result. The decisions are more complex than those of the usual mezzanine approach but the rewards are higher.
Learn more about:
- I/O Performance and Flexibility
- The Nuts and Bolts of the FMC Format
- The Challenges
- Electrical compatibility
- Mechanical compatibility
- Software/HDL compatibility
FMCs provide a great deal of freedom for designers to deliver high bandwidth, low latency solutions with minimal hardware since the standard bus structures are bypassed along with the removal of the interface devices. Typical FMC-based solutions can cope well (on a single FMC) with functionality such as multi-channel/multi-GSPS ADC/DACs or octal 10 Gbps fiber-optics, as well as supporting custom mixed functions. And FMCS provides that flexibility and performance in a relatively small, open-standard form factor.