The GX3500 is a user configurable FPGA 3U PXI card which offers 160 digital I/O signals for specific application needs. The card employs the Intel/Altera Cyclone III FPGA which can support clock rates up to 150 MHz and features over 55,000 logic elements and 2.34 Mb of memory. The GX3500 can also accept an expansion card assembly which can be used to customize the interface to the UUT – eliminating the need for additional external boards which are cumbersome and physically difficult to integrate into a test system. The GX36xx cards combine an expansion card with the GX3500 FPGA card. These cards support a variety of logic families including differential TTL, LVDS and ECL. Chapter 6 provides more detail regarding the available interface options.
The design of the FPGA is done by using Altera’s free Quartus II Web Edition tool set. Once the user has compiled the FPGA design, the image can be loaded into the FPGA via the PXI bus interface or via an on-board EEROM using the provided function library.