HEITEC AG’s electronics division has announced an OpenVPX board concept as a project example for edge applications in the defence sector. The board serves as a conceptual design and demonstrates a potential solution architecture.
Designed for use in OpenVPX systems (VITA 65), the compact module integrates a high-performance Intel Arria V FPGA with a Linux operating system as the central processing unit. Optionally, an AI accelerator card, such as the Hailo-8 (up to 26 TOPS), can be connected via an M.2 interface for small edge workloads.
The board features a customisable front panel housing an SFP slot (for copper or fibre-optic modules), an Ethernet port, and various status LEDs. Data is transmitted to the backplane via PCIe through the rear VPX connector, enabling seamless communication with other cards in the system. The backplane is specifically designed to meet the requirements of the defence industry and can also be offered in custom configurations upon request.
The card is suitable for a wide range of AI edge applications, including security detection/environmental monitoring, image processing, smaller LLMs, and other AI workloads. In addition, the solution supports both AI inference (applying a trained AI model to new data) and low-speed on-board training. The OpenVPX board can be flexibly adapted to specific customer requirements in terms of both, interfaces and functionality.
For more information, please visit https://www.heitec.de/en/
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