board support package Archives - 4DSP

4DSP’s New FPGA-based Products Benefit from Xilinx UltraScale

4DSP is using the newest and most powerful g Kintex UltraScale detail eneration of Xilinx FPGAs in its most recent products. The basic logic cell structure of these UltraScale devices remains essentially unchanged and the available resources on the chip are largely what you would expect – LUTs, Memory, DSP blocks, standard IOs, and SerDes transceivers. Xilinx has, however, fine-tuned these resources specifically for the increasingly demanding applications that designers face. As a close partner of Xilinx, 4DSP immediately began developing products to take advantage of the performance gains offered by these new devices and we introduced our first UltraScale-based product in December. 4DSP now offers Kintex UltraScale FPGAs on our three newest PCIe boards.

PC820 – carrier card with 1x FMC (VITA 57.1) site

PC821 – carrier card with 2x FMC (VITA 57.1) sites

PC870 – one 10-bit A/D ch. at 5Gsps and one 10-bit D/A ch. at 5Gsps

UltraScale FPGAs are designed for applications that require massive I/O and memory bandwidth, huge data flow, and excellent DSP and packet-processing performance. The 20nm UltraScale architecture provides a number of advantages over Xilinx’s previous highest-end Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 28nm FPGA families, the largest of which are capable of holding the equivalent of up to 20 million ASIC gates. UltraScale offers a significant performance boost over this with the equivalent of 50 million ASIC gates, while reducing power consumption. The design also addresses the scalability limitations of system throughput and latency, and it improves communication, clocking, and critical paths to accommodate greater data flow. UltraScale also offers more and faster interconnects to minimize the bottleneck to silicon performance at advanced nodes. The increased number of routing resources improves handling of the large amount of data that current high-speed SerDes can deliver to these programmable devices.

Comparison of the Maximum Values of 20nm and 28nm Devices (Xilinx)

The revamped clocking architecture on UltraScale chips uses a multi-region scheme reminiscent of ASIC designs. In this way, Xilinx greatly reduces the large portion of a clock period that is lost to skew. UltraScale devices additionally now support higher-resolution clock gating to enable ASIC-like power conservation. This results in higher-frequency operation, a reduction in timing problems caused by skew, lower power requirements, and higher overall bandwidth.

Working hand-in-hand with UltraScale devices is Xilinx’s Vivado Design Suite, an integrated design environment developed to support these newer, high-capacity FPGAs. Vivado is an IP and system-centric software tool that reduces the amount of time necessary to design programmable logic and I/O. It is a ground-up rewrite of their older design tool, ISE. 4DSP’s own StellarIP firmware design tool and proven reference design library supports both Vivado and ISE and can be used to automatically create compatible projects. StellarIP is part of the Board Support Package (BSP) included with all 4DSP FPGA-based boards and FMCs. The BSP also includes the 4FM GUI (multifunction test, monitoring and measurement tool) and the Data Analyzer (real-time digitized data and spectrum display tool).

4DSP is developing more new products that feature UltraScale processing, including a more advanced version of our popular CES720 (Compact Embedded System). These will be announced later this year, so keep an eye out here and in our press area for new developments.

Comprehensive Support is Part of the 4DSP Advantage

Many technology products are commodity goods that adhere to standards and deliver the performance they advertise. When it comes to the high-speed data acquisition and FPGA world, however, it’s a mixed bag of performance. Most products on the market look fine from a distance, but there can be a lot of room for disappointment upon closer inspection in the absence of a unified standard. The devil, as always, is in the details.

4DSP strives to promote, deliver and support its products in a transparent fashion so that there is no confusion about their capabilities. As part of this effort, we thoroughly test each board and system we sell to eliminate surprises for the end user. We also publish performance reports in which we share the results of tests for the noise, distortion, bandwidth, and offset performance of the ADCs and DACs used on our modules. This helps to reduce risk for our clients and to demonstrate that signal integrity is our top priority.

FMC144 ADC Bandwidth

ADC Bandwidth Performance (all channels) of the FMC144

4DSP adds value to the hardware that we deliver with our Board Support Package for Windows and Linux which contains reference designs for FMC (FPGA Mezzanine Card), FPGA carrier card and system level products. These serve as a baseline with all communication layers already implemented, so customers can build upon the designs as they customize for their specific applications.

Also included in the Board Support Package is our intuitive tool flow that gives engineers of various skill levels the ability to begin working with 4DSP products immediately upon delivery. StellarIP, the flagship application, streamlines the FPGA firmware development process by offering automated code and bitstream generation functions in an intuitive graphical interface. The StellarIP concept identifies IP blocks as stars that can be combined using channels known as wormholes to form top-level designs called constellations. It enables firmware designers to remove repetitive and error-prone tasks from their workflow and to automatically create top level files and manage clock domain crossings to expedite the creation of complex designs for programmable devices.

FMC144 Firmware Workflow2 4DSP Firmware compilation chain

4DSP additionally offers a multi-function tool called the 4FM GUI for monitoring voltage and temperature, performing memory tests, measuring PCIe bandwidth, and updating FPGA firmware. Also included is the Data Analyzer application which displays real-time digitized data and spectrum analysis. It is effectively an oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer in one simple tool.

Of course, it is also possible to receive more in-depth support directly from 4DSP engineers through the technical support forum, and all 4DSP products are complemented by extensive documentation. Support documents include user manuals, application notes, getting started guides and other instructional documents targeting specific use cases. We are always adding new step-by-step descriptions of how to configure fully-functional firmware designs from 4DSPs StellarIP library for hardware such as host interfaces, memory controllers, and FMC Board Controllers. We also provide tutorials on topics such as how to reuse existing StellarIP designs in your own AXI environment.

4DSP On Time Delivery Score 2014

This commitment to ensuring that those who choose 4DSP products get what they expect every time pays off in a measurable way. We closely monitor our on-time delivery (OTD) and returned merchandise authorization (RMA) statistics while endeavoring to keep the results on target toward aggressive performance goals. 4DSP is working on an initiative to share our OTD and RMA data to openly illustrate how this drives our consistently high customer satisfaction scores.