Product of the Week: Achronix’s VectorPath S7t-VG6 Accelerator Card

August 14, 2023

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The efficiency, reliability, and performance of AI inferencing, deep learning, vector processing, and other specialized workloads often rely on the ability to leverage functional hardware that supports the offloading of tasks, real-time processing, and energy efficiency to increase the overall system throughput and reduce processing bottlenecks.

Capable of supporting these features is the S7t VectorPath accelerator card from BittWare, featuring the 7nm Speedster7t FPGA from Achronix Semiconductor Corporation. Designed for compute-intensive, networking, and sensor processing use cases, the VectorPath Accelerator Card is most suitable in AI, ML, networking, and data center applications.

Achronix’s VectorPath S7t-VG6 Accelerator Card in Action

The VectorPath accelerator card features a standard-height PCIe dual-width board form factor measured at 111.15mm x 266.70mm (4.376in x 10.500in). The card is powered by the 52.5 x 52.5 packaged Achronix Speedster AC7t1500 FPGA, built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process, featuring 692K 6-input lookup tables (LUTs), 189 Mb of embedded RAM, and 2,560 machine learning processors (MLPs) integrated with BRAM72k and LRAM2k memory blocks to store data and aid in digital logic designs.

The AC7t1500 FPGA also supports up to 61 TOPS int8 performance and up to 4 Tbps of GDDR6 bandwidth.

The on-board memory of the VectorPath card features 16 GB of high-bandwidth GDDR6 memory divided into 8 banks, each of which has two independent 16-bit channels with 14 Gbps channels per bank, and a transfer capacity of 3.5 terabits per second. Also, the addition of 2D NoC allows the GDDR6 to read/write from the host over PCIe without using FPGA resources.

Supplementary on-board memory includes one bank DDR4-2666 with up to 4 GB (x72) of ECC, and flash memory for booting/storing the FPGA.

The VectorPath card is certified by the PCI SIG to support the latest PCIe Gen5 technology with a x16 host interface. The solution also supports USB ports for access to BMC, USB-JTAG, and USB-UART, with an additional USB port for daisy chain.

For external clocking, the VectorPath card supports 1PPs and 10 MHz reference clock front panel inputs.

Getting Started with Achronix’s VectorPath S7t-VG6 Accelerator Card

The accelerator card solution provides a software development toolkit with PCIe driver, libraries, and board monitoring utilities, like the included board management controller (BMC) and Achronix Tool Suite with ACE Design Tools for FPGA development. The solution also includes FPGA example projects and PCIe driver, libraries, board monitoring and reference designs.

Additional Resources:

• Product Page: https://go.achronix.com/vectorpath-accelerator-card
• Product Press Release: https://www.achronix.com/press-releases/achronix-vectorpath-accelerator-card-achieves-pcie-50-16-compliance-32-gts
• Product Data Sheet: https://www.achronix.com/sites/default/files/docs/Vectorpath_S7t-VG6_Accelerator_Card_Bittware_PB999_V4.pdf