UltraScale Archives - 4DSP | Embedded Systems Blog

4DSP Compact Embedded System Performance Boosted by UltraScale and SDAccel

We recently announced two new additions to our innovative compact embedded system (CES) product line. The CES820 and ruggedized CESCC820 both benefit from powerful new Kintex UltraScale FPGAs supplied by longtime 4DSP partner Xilinx, and they offer support for the most recent version of Xilinx’s SDAccel development environment for OpenCL™, C, and C++. While the CES820 features the same durable aluminum enclosure as the CES720, which 4DSP introduced in 2014 to much enthusiasm from our customers, it represents a step forward in performance for the CES line.

The CESCC820 goes even further by providing a conduction-cooled and more vibration-resistant chassis, as well as military-grade Meritec connectivity options. The more spacious, yet still compact enclosure offers the choice to install more than one FPGA Mezzanine card (FMC) inside as a build option. These attributes make the ruggedized model an ideal choice for a wide range of deployed embedded aerospace and defense applications where Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) are critical and more demanding IO or DSP requirements are called for.

Both CES820 versions have a quad-core, low-power Intel Atom CPU that is tightly coupled to the FPGA, making them perfect for handling the high-level programmability necessary to perform anti-jamming, compression, encryption, high-performance signal processing for such applications as communication signal analysis. The full list of features, data sheets, block diagrams, and additional photos of these systems can be found on their respective product pages: CES820 and CESCC820.

FMC modules for these systems can be selected from 4DSP’s extensive and diverse portfolio or from a third-party vendor enabling extensive functional customization using VITA 57.1-compatible FPGA mezzanine cards. The 4DSP Board Support Package (BSP) and StellarIP firmware tool and library are included with these systems. These intuitive tools allow designers to jump into development with modular reference designs that exercise the systems’ capabilities and provide high-level interfaces and driver support.

These systems support the Xilinx SDAccel FPGA development environment. The newest version of SDAccel (2015.1) offers enhancements that make the Eclipse-based integrated development environment easier to use as a result of new debug and profiling features that speed the development and deployment of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels. This release also builds on SDAccel’s Khronos standard compliance, supporting a new OpenCL Installable Client Driver (ICD). The ICD extension allows multiple implementations of OpenCL to co-exist on the same system, giving applications developers the ability to choose between CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs in real-time. This accelerates run time and results in power savings.

Looking ahead, as an SDAccel development environment-certified Xilinx Alliance Member, 4DSP’s future FPGA-based board and system-level products will also support SDAccel as part of our continuing effort to give system designers the very best tools for efficiently achieving great results.

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.