Xilinx launches three dsp development platforms
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Described as the company's biggest move in digital signal processing since it started developing dsp48 slices, Xilinx has launched three dsp development kits which are said to further extend the engineer's ability to adopt fpgas in order to reach higher levels of signal processing performance.
Giles Peckham, European marketing director, noted: "We are delivering three choices which target a range of design styles and applications, bringing productive solutions to those who need performance they can't get from dsps."
Two of the three options are based on Xilinx' technology, while the third – developed in association with Avnet Electronics Marketing – is a coprocessing solution using an unnamed third party's expertise.
The Virtex-6 FPGA DSP Development Kit targets peak signal processing performance applications and features Texas Instruments' a/d and d/a converters on an FPGA Mezzanine Card designed by 4DSP. This kit is said to enable customers to tune performance in both the analogue and digital domains.
This platform is targeted at power users who need processing power in excess of 1TMAC/s. Peckham noted: "There is a hard core of high performance applications where users are looking for a much as they can be given, including medical imaging, radar and sonar."
Meanwhile, the Spartan-6 FPGA DSP Development kit is aimed at those looking to add dsp to existing systems. According to Peckham, the kit allows designers to get '40 times the performance of a single chip dsp'.
Finally, the Spartan-6 FPGA Coprocessing DSP Kit brings together fpgas, system control processing and dsp in the one platform. The Spartan-6 is positioned in this kit as being ideal for offloading ultra high performance dsp tasks or providing flexible peripheral expansion options.
Each kit comes with a baseboard and hardware, as well as a full suite of design tools, reference designs, demonstrations and documentation and design files.
