This white paper is the first in a series about the benefits of using 40 Gbps interconnects for use in Defense and Aerospace rugged deployed COTS systems.

Interest in reconfigurable embedded computing in the defense and aerospace market has grown significantly as new generations of FPGAs present developers with a level of processing performance and potential I/O bandwidth that cannot easily be matched by conventional CPU configurations.

In the same way as one might strip out unnecessary weight in a car aimed for racing, the FMC is a performance solution that strips away unnecessary generic interfaces for direct FPGA driven I/O. But that requires knowledge to achieve the desired performance and to ensure the host and FMC module will work well together. This paper outlines some of the considerations in order to assess and the ensure that the host and module will integrate.