BusinessWire
November 14, 2005 08:30 AM US Pacific Timezone

PrismTech Demonstrates Breakthrough FPGA Technology to Support Software Defined Radio (SDR) Waveform Portability and Reuse; Integrated Circuit ORB Offers 100x Performance Improvement over Software ORBs; Removes Barriers to FPGA Use in SDR

ANAHEIM, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 14, 2005--PrismTech, a leading provider of productivity tools and middleware, today unveiled a breakthrough FPGA middleware technology, its Spectra ICO (Integrated Circuit ORB).

The Spectra ICO demonstration introduced at SDR'05, the SDR Forum's Annual Conference, illustrates how a CORBA(R) ORB can be embedded natively in an FPGA and used to control logic within the FPGA.

Using Spectra ICO, one eliminates the need to develop custom proxies on General Purpose Processors (GPPs) and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) that simply serve to establish communication to waveform objects residing within FPGAs. These proxies (sometimes referred to as Hardware Abstraction Layers or HALs) have been used when designing to SDR architectures such as the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) and are meant to increase portability and re-use, but in practice, tend to increase latency, reduce throughput, and lower re-use potential.

Spectra ICO further eliminates any need to embed GPP cores into FPGAs in order to offer software ORB capability. Although viable, this approach tends to require significant gate count and memory utilization and generally these processing cores cannot be clocked fast enough to deal with the ever-increasing performance requirements of SDR applications.

The Spectra ICO demo equipment consists of a PC running the client code (developed using a PrismTech OpenFusion C++ ORB) and an Altera Cyclone II development board that hosts the FPGA. The software running on the PC generates a CORBA GIOP message bound for the ICO, encapsulates it in an Ethernet frame and transmits the packet to the demonstration board. An Ethernet controller on the Altera FPGA demo board receives the packet, strips off the Ethernet encapsulation and passes the GIOP message to the ICO residing within the FPGA. The ICO processes the message, extracts the data in the message body and transfers it to the internal logic blocks of the FPGA representing the custom signal processing design blocks of an SDR waveform. If required by the CORBA message, the ICO generates and sends a reply message back to the client on the PC.

Spectra ICO utilizes approximately 5% of the logic elements of an Altera EP2C35 and no memory blocks. Initial benchmarks have shown it to process CORBA messages at rates exceeding 100 times those found in software ORBs. When combined with PrismTech's soon to be released capability to generate VHDL code directly from the Spectra SE modeling tool, Spectra ICO will ease the burden of developing SCA-compliant VHDL implementations for SDR developers.

Spectra ICO is part of the Spectra Power Tools product line of software tools and operating environments for SDR development and deployment. Spectra Power Tools eliminate the need to handcraft SDR solutions, ensure best practice software design and standards conformance, and help insulate developers from the complexities of SDR architectures. They thus facilitate higher engineer productivity, shorter time-to-market, and application reuse, portability and evolution. Spectra Power Tools currently support the military radio Software Communications Architecture (SCA) v2.2 specification, but are capable of being applied to any software-based communications architecture. Efforts are currently underway to develop Spectra Tools for various commercial SDR domains such as 3G cellular and 802.16 (WiMAX).

Introducing Spectra ICO, PrismTech's VP of SDR Engineering, Dominick Paniscotti, said, "We believe that this breakthrough technology finally allows practical SDR waveform portability and reuse across GPP, DSP and FPGA processing elements. Together with PrismTech's embedded C++ and C ORBs (for GPPs and DSPs), we now have a complete and unique middleware solution for SDR Operating Environments (OEs) that does not impose undue overhead on the radio platform. With these technology advances in OEs, and the development tools support offered by Spectra SE, we are rapidly removing the perceived barriers to wide scale SDR adoption, namely SW&P overhead, waveform portability and developer productivity. Going into 2006, SDR is for the first time becoming commercially viable by addressing a clear business case (time-to-market reduction and increased component flexibility and cost advantage) with a robust solution."

PrismTech's SDR chief scientist, Jerry Bickle, added, "Spectra ICO's 100x performance leap over software ORBs is truly a technology breakthrough and brings the FPGA into the SCA domain as a 'first-class citizen' for the first time. As an originator of the SCA, it pleases me greatly to see the technology emerging to fully exploit the power of a standardized SDR architecture."

For further information about the Spectra Power Tools product line please visit PrismTech's website at http://www.prismtech.com.

Finally, PrismTech wishes to acknowledge the greatly appreciated support of Altera, and especially Joel Seely, in facilitating the development of Spectra ICO.

About PrismTech

Founded in 1992, with offices in the USA and Europe, PrismTech is a privately held software products company. PrismTech serves international Fortune 500 customers in the telecommunications, data communications, defense and aerospace sectors. PrismTech is an acknowledged leader in productivity tools and middleware, with solutions ranging from wide-scale integration to embedded real-time systems, supporting applications from operations support systems (OSS) through to software defined radio (SDR). For additional information about PrismTech, visit the web site at http://www.prismtech.com.

CORBA is a registered trademark of the Object Management Group, Inc in the U.S. and other countries. OpenFusion, Spectra and Spectra Power Tools are trademarks of PrismTech. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.