Samtec releases two FireFly VITA 57.4 FMC+ development kits

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Samtec has launched two new FireFly FMC+ Development Kits as evaluation and development platforms for the company’s FireFly optical engines. One dev kit supports data rates of 25 Gbits/s per channel while the second runs at 28 Gbits/s per channel.

The 25-/28-Gbits/s FireFly FMC+ modules provide up to 400-/448-Gbits/s full-duplex bandwidth over up to 16 channels from any FPGA/SoC that supports the VITA 57.4 interface to an industry-standard multi-mode fiber optic cable. The kits support several protocols including Ethernet, InfiniBand, Fibre Channel, and Aurora typically used in video, mil/aero, embedded computing, instrumentation, HPC, and data center applications.

“FireFly optical engines  make the electrical to optical conversion in the transmit path and the optical to electrical conversion in the receive path,” said Samtec. They support cable lengths up to 100 m.

“Evaluating 100-Gbits/s and 112-Gbits/s optical engine technology has high barriers of entry,” said Matt Burns, product marketing manager at Samtec, Inc., in a statement. “Samtec’s new FireFly FMC+ Development Kits simplify the evaluation and development of FireFly technology by using the emerging FMC+ interface typical of high-performance FPGA/SoC development tools.”

Both kits can run system data or BERT testing from a single channel to all 16 channels in parallel. Technical documentation and FPGA reference designs are available. For more information, download the product brief or, for immediate technical support, contact Samtec’s applications experts at .