6U cPCI card features high-performance DSP
SEPTEMBER 19--BittWare Inc. (Concord, NH; www.bittware.com) has released the Tiger-6U-cPCI, a new DSP board featuring the 250-MHz TigerSHARC DSP (ADSP-TS101S) from Analog Devices. The 6U CompactPCI board has eight ADSP-TS101S DSPs, a 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI interface via BittWare's SharcFIN ASIC, up to 1024 Mbytes of SDRAM, a Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA, and two PMC interfaces with I/O connections directly to the DSPs.
With 12 GFLOPS of sustained processing power and more than 5 Gbytes/s of I/O bandwidth, the board's typical power consumption is only 20 W, yielding a high power-to-performance ratio. By adding two of BittWare's Tiger-PMC+ modules to the board, customers can bring the total DSP power up to 24 GFLOPS in a single 6U cPCI slot.
With eight ADSP-TS101S DSPs at its core, the Tiger-PCI board offers up to 12 GFLOPS of processing power. The eight DSPs are arranged in two clusters of four. Each cluster is connected by a local bus, which also connects a 256-Mbyte bank of SDRAM (one per cluster). The Tiger-6U-cPCI also features a third global bank of up to 512-Mbyte SDRAM, which is shared between the two DSP clusters via local PCI bus. The local PCI bus is split in to three 64-bit, 66 MHz segments, providing over 1.5 Gbytes/s of simultaneous data transfer.
A Xilinx Virtex-II reconfigurable FPGA is also shared between the two DSP clusters via PCI, allowing system designers to implement a wide range of additional functions such as complex digital interfaces, general purpose compute engines, or special purpose computing blocks. It provides 64 user I/O pins via the front panel and another 64 user I/O pins to the rear panel, all of which are configurable for single-ended or LVDS termination.
For other I/O interfaces, the board features eight 250-Mbyte/s external link ports accessible via the rear panel, as well as an additional eight 250-Mbyte/s link ports and two 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI interfaces to the PMC+ sites. The PMC+ sites are compatible with standard PMC modules or with BittWare's PMC+ I/O modules. BittWare PMC+ modules have access to the site's PMC+ extensions, which include four additional link ports connected directly to the DSPs.
Complete software support for the Tiger-6U-cPCI is available through BittWare's set of development and run-time tools. BittWare's DSP21k Toolkit allows users to easily develop application code and integrate the Tiger-PCI into their systems. Drivers are available for Windows and Linux; a source code porting kit is also available. The board is fully compatible with Analog Devices' VisualDSP++ code-development tools and supports in-circuit emulation, and BittWare's VisualDSP Target provides a software debugger target that is integrated with VisualDSP++. The board is also supported by SpeedDSP, BittWare's extensive set of highly optimized C-callable runtime libraries, and by SharcLAB, BittWare's target for MATLAB, Simulink, Stateflow, and Real-Time Workshop. Real-time operating systems available for the Tiger-PCI include Analog Devices' VisualDSP Kernel (VDK), Wind River Systems' Virtuoso, and OSE Systems' OSEck.