UM062 – PCIe490 User Manual
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UM062
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2 Product Overview
The PCIE490 is a PCI Express (PCIe) expansion enclosure containing 8 x16 PCIe slots
(4lanes connected per slot). The PCIE490 incorporates a PCIe expansion card which allows
for a 16 lanes cable PCIexpress connection to a HOST computer. On the HOST computer
side a x16 PCIe slot is required to plug the receiving PCIe expansion host card.
The PCIE490 is specially designed to operate multiple FPGA based PCIexpress boards like
the Abaco PC820 and PC821 boards. This system has the advantage of offering better
control over cooling of the system, easily rack mounting of the system and separating FPGA
and digitizer hardware from the HOST computer hardware. It can also be used to house
other PCIe such as GPUs for high performance computing, storage adapters or networking
equipment.
The following figure illustrates the PCIE490 system architecture.
Slot0
(no PCIe)
Slot1
(75W)
Slot2
(30W)
Slot3
(75W)
Slot4
(30W)
Slot5
(75W)
Slot6
(30W)
Slot7
(75W)
Slot8
(30W)
Slot9
(
cable
exapnsion
)
PCIexpress
Switch
4 lanes
4 lanes
4 lanes
4 lanes
4 lanes
4 lanes
16 lanes
4 lanes
4 lanes
Figure 1:PCIE490 system architecture
2.1 Chassis Description
The PCIE490 is a 4U high 19 inch wide chassis offering 8 PCIe x16 expansion slots. Each
expansion slot has a 4lanes PCIexpress generation 2 connections to the local PCIexpress
switch. The chassis is equipped with fans located in the rear of the chassis for air cooling.
The suck air into the chassis from the rear panel.
The system has a total of 10 front panel slots that can be used for front panel IO from cards
plugged into the PCIE490. The slots are numbered from 0 to 9 and Figure 2 and Figure 3
show their respective locations.
Slot 0 does not have a PCIe expansion slot associated to it, it is only used in case the Card
plugged into slot 1 requires additional front panel IO. This is the case if a PC821 card is
pluged into slot 1 for example.
Slot 9 typically holds the 16 lanes PCIexpress expansion cable adapter card
Slots 1 through 8 are the PCIexpress expansion slots that can carry a PCIexpress compliant
card. The slots 1,3,5 and 7 are able to support cards that consume upto 75 Watts, the other
slots are designed to support cards that consume up to 30 Watts.
