Alta A429 devices are available in a variety of channel configurations.
These devices can have one or two “Banks” where each Bank contains multiple receive and transmit Channels.
Each Bank is an independent logical device – the software controlling the device will have a separate Device ID for each Bank and will control each Bank separately. This is similar to 1553 channels on our 1553 boards, where each 1553 channel on the board is an independent device controlled through a unique Device ID.
Here are some examples:
A PCI-A429-4 board has one bank of 4 A429 channels, where the 4 channels are shared RX and TX.
A PCI-A429-8 board has one bank of 8 A429 channels, where the 8 channels are shared RX and TX.
A PCI-A429-16 board has one bank of 16 A429 channels, where the first 8 channels are shared RX and TX and the remaining 8 channels are RX only.
A PCI-A429-30 board has two banks. The first bank has 16 A429 channels, where the first 8 channels are shared RX and TX and the remaining 8 channels are RX only. The second bank has 14 A429 channels, where the first 8 channels are shared RX and TX and the remaining 6 channels are RX only.
Note that the reason we have one bank with 16 channels and another bank with 14 channels, rather than two banks of 16 channels, is the limited number of pins on the connector – not enough pins for 32 channels.
