Daring DSP
Xilinx’s New SXT

These days, FPGAs are the rarely-disputed champions of single-chip DSP processing power.  The sheer volume of data you can crunch with a chip that can (conceptually, at least) crank out hundreds of multiplications per cycle at clock frequencies approaching half-a-gigahertz is staggering.  No competing technology matches the raw GMACs numbers that FPGAs can claim.

Often, a claim is as far as it goes, however, with significant design barriers barring the path between your elegantly-parallelizable algorithm and the neatly-arranged rows of multipliers and accumulators waiting on your FPGA.  Sometimes, the barrier is in the I/O ring of the chip as it can be difficult to feed all those hungry multipliers with enough data to keep them busy.  Now, with their new 65nm Virtex-5 SXT family, Xilinx has added high-speed serial transceivers to the DSP-enabled FPGA mix.  Along with beefed-up DSP blocks, additional RAM, and other goodies, this FPGA family hits a whole new level in potential DSP performance.

Beginning with Virtex-4, Xilinx began offering a variety of flavors in their FPGA families – some with more connectivity, some with more embedded computing resources, some with more DSP resources.  With “last season’s” 90nm Virtex-4 – Xilinx had 3 flavors – “LX,” which had the most basic logic fabric, “SX” which had the most DSP resources, and “FX” which had high-speed transceivers and embedded PowerPC processors.  Now, with Virtex-5, they’ve expanded to four flavors, and transceivers are being offered with a much larger number of them – a testament to the proliferation of serial connectivity in today’s system designs. [more]