FROM
THE EDITOR
This week we're attending the Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco. FPGAs are taking the embedded systems space by storm, partially because of low-cost platform-enabled devices like Xilinx's new Spartan-3E, the subject of our first new feature this week.
Our second article comes from Xilinx and AccelChip and discusses an approach to high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) implementation on FPGAs. The key to unocking the inherent power of DSP on FPGA is the tool and methodology piece.
Next week, we'll be bringing you a wrapup of the embedded systems conference as seen through our FPGA-colored glasses.
Thanks
for reading! If
there's anything we can do to make our publications
more useful to you, please let us know at: comments@fpgajournal.com
Kevin
Morris – Editor
FPGA and Programmable Logic Journal
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CURRENT
FEATURE ARTICLES
Two Bucks
Xilinx Introduces Spartan-3E
Plug and Play Design Methodologies for FPGA-based Signal Processing
by Narinder Lall, Xilinx, Inc.
and
Eric Cigan, AccelChip, Inc.
Lattice
Launches XP
Non-Volatility at the Forefront of FPGA
High-Density FPGA-to-ASIC
Conversions using Structured ASIC: Fills the Gap
by Rick Mosher and Bob Kirk, AMI Semiconductor, Inc.
Breakthrough
Bandwidth
SerDes Hits New Heights
Making the Jump to 10G
by Abhijit Athavale
and Brian Seemann, Xilinx, Inc.
Co-Verification Methodology
for Platform FPGAs
by Milan Saini, Xilinx, Inc.
and Ross Nelson, Mentor Graphics
Simulator
Savvy
Getting the Most From Your HDL
The
Impact of Timing Exceptions on FPGA Performance
by James Henson, FishTail
Design Automation Inc.
Prime-time
Processing
Are Embedded Systems on FPGA Ready?
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Two Bucks
Xilinx Introduces Spartan-3E
For two US dollars, you can buy a bottle of water from the vending machine in a New York hotel lobby, or you could buy a single subway token. You could get into a New York taxicab, but you’d have to get right back out again. If you’re driving your own car, you could buy one gallon of unleaded gasoline. At most coffee houses, you could get a cup of plain drip coffee, but not an espresso drink. You could probably talk to your attorney for about 10 seconds. When it comes right down to it, two dollars won’t buy you very much. Now, however, it will get you a Xilinx Spartan-3E 100,000-gate FPGA with 72KB of block RAM, 4 18X18 hard multipliers, and 108 user I/Os.
Xilinx reckons that, within the last seven years, they’ve dropped the price of a single gate of programmable logic by a factor of thirty. This more than doubles the not-so-leisurely pace of Moore’s Law. During the same period, cell-based ASICs have probably fallen behind Mr. Moore due to skyrocketing NREs (and possibly Mr. Moore’s high-tech running shoes.) What this means is that the old equation for deciding which device should be at the center of your new high-volume application has undergone some major changes. [more]
Plug and Play Design Methodologies for FPGA-based Signal Processing
by Narinder Lall, Xilinx, Inc
and Eric Cigan, AccelChip, Inc
Digital signal processing has traditionally been the domain of DSP processors and ASICs. Since the late 1990s, FPGAs have emerged as alternative options for DSP designers. FPGAs are a good fit for applications that demand higher performance than what DSP processors can offer, yet do not meet the criteria to justify ASIC economics.
FPGAs Make Their Mark on Signal Processing
FPGAs have evolved from those where DSP structures were built using logic-only cells to those having dedicated embedded DSP structures, such as dynamically reconfigurable XtremeDSP slices in Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs. Such FPGAs incorporate tremendous parallel processing capability. For example, new Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs support as many as 512 MAC engines, each capable of providing up to 500MHz throughput. Figure 1 shows how FPGAs for signal processing have evolved over the years. [more]
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