Development software for combined FPGA and DSP applications

Design Automation

8 February 2006 Design Automation

Multiprocessor software company, 3L, has launched Diamond FPGA, a unified development platform for the seamless creation of applications with FPGA and DSP components. It is said to be an easy to use, flexible environment where DSP plus FPGA technologies can be quickly leveraged and applied to demanding signal processing applications.

The company says that Diamond FPGA builds a single application file by taking DSP and FPGA tasks and automatically combining them with all the necessary support logic. Loading this one file initialises every DSP and FPGA in the system and starts the application running.

Peter Robertson, managing director of 3L, believes that the main attraction of Diamond is its ease of use. "We have avoided the rush to uncontrolled complexity which is wrongly seen as the way to get performance. By keeping Diamond simple, we have created a development platform that is both efficient and accessible."

Driving Diamond's development is the increasing deployment of systems that integrate DSP and FPGA, where the FPGA acts as a co-processor or hardware accelerator. To generate the hardware components in this hardware-software co-design environment, engineers employ direct VHDL techniques or high-level design tools from Celoxica coupled with model-based design using Simulink from The Mathworks and System Generator from Xilinx. Communication between hardware and software is then managed automatically by Diamond's built-in message-passing software.

"With more and more developers using our DK Design Suite to accelerate signal processing in DSP/FPGA systems, the similarity of programming paradigm using CSP (communicating sequential processes) makes DK and Diamond a good fit for rapid development and systems integration," said Steve Chappell, director of applications engineering at Celoxica.

"3L has been supporting true multiprocessor DSP applications on our hardware for the last 10 years," says Flemming Christensen, managing director of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology. "Now Diamond makes it easy to use the on-board FPGAs as well."

Diamond FPGA lets developers optimise their applications, using FPGAs for operations requiring the fine-grain parallelism of hardware and DSPs for the more sequential, thread-based functions.

For more information contact Hendri Veldman, Sundance Multiprocessor Technology, 0944 1494 793167, [email protected]

Share this article:

Categories

Design Automation

Development software for combined FPGA and DSP applications

Further reading:

Publications by Technews