The Reflective Memory (RM) interface is based on the use of a special hardware, manufactured by ABACO or General Electric (formerly by GE Fanuc and VMIC). RM interface boards are available for a variety of systems, such as PCI Express, PCI and VME. ibaPDA drivers support the boards VMIPCI 5565, 5576, 5579, 5587, 5588 and respectively the more recent models PCI-5565PIORC and PCIE-5565PIORC (see System requirements).
More recently, iba AG developed the ibaFOB-R board as replacement for the obsolete PCIE-5565 boards. Please refer to the ibaFOB-R manual for a detailed description of the board.
ibaPDA supports a total of 4 Reflective Memory boards. As the new ibaFOB-R is also seen as a Reflective Memory board, the ibaFOB-R can therefore be used 4 times or in combination with other Reflective Memory boards up to 4 in total.
The "Direct Memory Access" mode (DMA mode) is supported for the boards VMIPCI 5565 respectively PCI-5565PIORC and PCIE-5565PIORC, and also for the ibaFOB-R.
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The DMA functionality can only be used if an ibaFOB board is installed in addition to the Reflective Memory board to generate the required data acquisition interrupt. This is not the case for the ibaFOB-R board, as this card is also capable of generating the data acquisition interrupt independently. However the ibaFOB-R interrupt will only be used in the absence of another ibaFOB board, which therefore always gets priority. |
The Reflective Memory interface offers different module types.
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Reflective Memory with up to 1000 analog and 1000 digital signals per module, supporting asynchronous mode and DMA
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Reflective Memory dig512 with up to 32 * 16 digital signals per module, supporting asynchronous mode and DMA
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X-Pact Lite, with up to 1000 analog and 1000 digital signals per module, supporting asynchronous mode and DMA (only with license for X-Pact v1 and/or v2)
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HiPAC Request (only with HiPAC interface license)
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Reflective Memory Text
A maximum of up to 1024 modules are supported per interface.
The number of signals to be used is only limited by the ibaPDA license and the performance of the systems.
For further information on module configuration, refer to ...
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Module type X-Pact Lite, description see manual ibaPDA-Request-X-Pact
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Module type HiPAC Request, description see manual ibaPDA-Request-HiPAC
Together with the Reflective Memory interface license and the appropriate interface boards you can furthermore use Reflective Memory as data channel for the Request products:
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Request-HPCi (incl. HPCi-Lite), refer to software manual ibaPDA-Request-HPCi
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Request-DTBox, refer to software manual ibaPDA-Request-DTBox
Functional principle
The PC boards are used to establish a connection to a RM network. P2P connections to a single node are possible as well.
An efficient and fast hardware architecture provides for deterministic data transmission with low latency and low CPU load.
Individual nodes on the network only need to write into/read from the dual port RAM and then within microseconds all nodes on the network have the same data.