Fusion Adds ARM
Actel’s Embedded Wonder Gets Smarter

It slices, it dices, and it has flash-memory. It gets your whites whiter, removes those collar rings, and flaunts flexible FPGA fabric. It has more flavor, is less filling, and boasts programmable analog to boot. It softens your hands while you do the dishes and offers a wide selection of pre-configured IP. Now how much would you pay? Well don’t answer that because now, Actel’s already incredible versatile Fusion programmable system chips also pack an available ARM7 processor.

Actel’s claims about Fusion sound like something from one of those impossibly overblown daytime soap opera commercials. Fusion is an incredibly versatile, in-system reprogrammable system-on-a-chip platform that incorporates programmable analog, custom digital logic fabric, embedded flash and SRAM, and versatile IO options. Now, just when the embedded systems equivalent of the Swiss army knife was almost too big to fit in the pocket of your Gore-Tex pants, Actel has added the option of an embedded configurable 32-bit ARM7 core and peripherals.

Just about the only thing you’ll need to fuse to your fusion device to build whatever it is you’re building is some commodity-grade DRAM. After that, you can probably just start shipping boards while your marketing department decides whether your product will be a motor controller, an MP3 player, or a digital multi-meter. OK, that might be a stretch. But the point is, Fusion will let you design just about anything on a single chip with the flexibility to reprogram it in the field.

For the risk-averse system designer, the first-to-market innovator, the we’re-not-quite-sure-what-we’re-making marketer, or the (oh, I’m so jealous, why didn’t we have these when I was in college?) precocious university engineering student, an ARM-enabled Fusion device on a development board will let you light up some serious LEDs with your idea faster than just about any other approach. [more]

Image Processing Applications On New Generation FPGAs
by Rahul V. Shah, eInfochips Ltd.

The new generation of FPGAs with DSP resource and embedded processors are attracting the interest of the image processing market. With enhanced capabilities most of the DSP processing work can be off loaded from the software program stack to embedded processors and DSP resources on the FPGA to improve performance and reduce the cost of the whole system.

The traditional way of implementing algorithms in software limits the performance because the data is processed serially. Frequency of operation can be increased up to a certain extent to increase the performance or the required data rate to process the image data, but increasing the frequency above certain limits causes system level and board level issues that become a bottle neck in the design.

With the current image processing applications moving towards consumer markets, the amount of data to be processed has increased at a fast pace. The new compression algorithms on the market are keeping up with the increasing data requirement. [more]