4DSP develops advanced scalable technology

The FM680 features a design and manufacturing technique that provides customers with a configurability called Blast (Board Level Advanced Scalable Technology).

4DSP created Blast to accelerate the manufacturing process for customer specific configurations that normally delay the production cycle and add to production costs.

In addition to Blast, the FM680 offers advancements in digital signal processing (DSP) over previous FPGA technologies.

The Xilinx Virtex 6 provides more usable FPGA resources at a substantially reduced power consumption and therefore generated heat.

The FM680 is suitable for rapid prototyping as well as production of video applications where there is a need for abundant FPGA logic resources for specialised image processing.

The FM680 is also suitable for radar and sonar signal processors and specialised software-defined radio (SDR) as used in the US Navy's JTRS Program.

Coupling the advancement of the Xilinx Virtex 6 FPGA with Blast, the FM680 offers the customer greater granularity while keeping a rapid manufacturing process in place.

Up to five Blast mounting sites or 'Blast sites' of BGA type, each containing 100 single-ended I/O pins connected to the Virtex FPGA, can be mounted as an assembly.

The Blast concept allows customers a mix of five combinations of memory devices, including JPEG2000 codec, dedicated signal processor, H-264 MPEG-4, 32Gbyte solid-state drives and more.

'One example of a recent customer's request was to have 4DSP to implement the Texas Instruments TMS320C6457 DSP chip on a double Blast,' said Douglas Sherrod, director of marketing and business development at 4DSP.

'This allowed the customer to pull forward legacy DSP code to be reused along with a complex algorithm implemented inside the Virtex 6 FPGA, thus saving investment in proven legacy DSP code,' he added.

The FM680 follows the Virtex 5 based FM489 Series where major configuration options were worked out using 4DSP's just-in-time (JIT) process Blast concept.

This manufacturing process provided customers with the ability to specify architectural features such as memory type, added signal processors, microcontrollers, video Codecs, solid-state drives and custom circuits.

Specific variants of the FM680 will be rolled out within the next few months.

Among them, the VID675 will feature a six codec JPEG2000 hardware compression engine based on the Analog Devices ADV212.

The VID675 is suitable for on-the-fly image processing from multiple cameras and high-speed real-time compression.

With sustained performance of 350 megapixels/s, the VID675 allows simultaneous compression of 16 coloured video streams 640x480.

UAVs or digital imaging applications that require lossless compression in real time can utilise the performance offered by the VID675.

FM680 and VID675 Series processors are backed by 4DSP's engineering services programme, where specific FPGA algorithmic processes are developed to meet customer requirements.