The HTX-Board : A Rapid Prototyping Station

The Hypertransport technology as a chip-to-chip and board-to-board interconnect technology is a well established standard, used in various computing systems. New is the standardization of an expansion slot with direct Hypertransport connection, called HTX. The opportunity of such a direct I/O interface led to the development of a rapid prototyping station with a HTX connector, pluggable into any HTX-equipped system. The architecture and physical design of this HTX device is presented. Beside the HTX connection, the most remarkable parts in the architecture are a FPGA as main component and an array of six high speed serial transceivers. The intend of the transceivers is to build up custom direct interconnection networks. Beside the use for rapid prototyping and development of custom interconnects, possible applications are co-processing and CPU-offloading. The physical board design is shown with the most challenging problems like cost-efficient stack-up, the power distribution system and signal integrity for high speed signals. The Hypertransport Consortium already adopted this development as a Reference Design in their portfolio. To our knowledge, until now there are no other comparable devices available.