Ruggedised signal processing CompactPCI board also future adaptable

Computer/Embedded Technology

Computing hardware suppliers

Computing software suppliers

Computing technology suppliers

printer friendly version

14 June 2006 Computer/Embedded Technology

BittWare has laid out its plans for a new family of rugged hybrid signal processing boards based around the Altera Stratix II GX. At the Military Technologies Conference in Boston, Bittware said that the GT-3U-cPCI (GT3U) will be the first board in a new line of hybrid embedded solutions, and features Altera's Stratix II GX FPGA, a processing cluster consisting of four ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC DSPs from Analog Devices, and up to 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM memory. This conduction-cooled board is optimised for high-end, multiprocessing applications while also enabling complete flexibility for future adaptability via the Altera FPGA.

"The debate over FPGAs vs DSPs in rugged applications is a moot point. Military customers today require multiprocessor-based designs using a combination of floating point DSPs with FPGAs to provide flexibility," stated Jeffry Milrod, CEO of BittWare. "Our hybrid signal processing family combines the awesome Stratix II GX FPGA with the market's best floating point DSP in compact, rugged solutions."

The GT3U uses BittWare's ATLANTiS architecture to interface between the FPGA and DSPs. Implemented in the FPGA, ATLANTiS provides a single solution for the three dilemmas facing multiprocessor designs: how to allocate the I/O bandwidth among the processors, how to easily connect the various I/Os to any and all processing resources, and how to integrate FPGA and DSP processing. By implementing ATLANTiS these dilemmas are solved as with 4 GBps of continuous throughput there is ample FPGA resources remain for additional processing.

A processing cluster consisting of four ADSP-TS201 DSPs provides 14,4 GFLOPS of floating-point and 57,5 BOPS of 16-bit fixed-point processing power per board. The Stratix FPGA provides pre-, post-, or co-processing to complement the DSP processing cluster. The GT3U also supports memory modules of up to 1 GB of DDR2 SDRAM.

The front panel supplies four channels of high-speed SerDes transceivers, while the back panel supplies 10/100 Ethernet, two standard interfaces of either RS232 or RS422, and 34 LVDS signal pairs comprised of 16 inputs and 20 outputs.

BittWare offers comprehensive software support. The BittWorks software tools provide host interface libraries and a wide variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools.

Share this article:

Categories

Computer/Embedded Technology

Ruggedised signal processing CompactPCI board also future adaptable

Further reading:

Publications by Technews