Xilinx Inc. in San Jose, Calif., is announcing a low-cost development platform for implementing digital signal processing (DSP) designs using the Spartan-3A DSP family of FPGAs. The XtremeDSP Solutions Starter Platform is for engineers developing DSP applications. The tool, which supports industry-standard peripherals, connectors, and interfaces, is for use with the Xilinx System Generator for DSP and ISE software and provides hardware to implement applications such as video surveillance, mobile software defined radio systems, and portable medical ultrasound. The XtremeDSP Solutions Starter Platform includes a VGA port for developing video processing algorithms, an Ethernet 10/100/1000 PHY, as well as an RS-232 port for simple communications with a remote console. This starter platform also comes with 128M X 32-bit DDR2 SDRAM, 16Mx8 parallel/BPI configuration flash, and 64 megabytes of SPI configuration/storage flash. Also supported is a full JTAG interface for configuration and debug, as well as a System ACE Module connector. For adding further functionality, the tool includes an expansion slot to enable designers to integrate add-on cards available from Xilinx distributors. The Spartan-3A DSP 1800A device offers more than 20 billion multiply-accumulates per second (GMACS) for under $30. The parallel computing nature of the FPGA fabric supports much higher sampling rates and more data throughput than a standard digital signal processor, delivering 3 to 4 x the performance along with better computational power efficiency. For more information, contact Xilinx online at www.xilinx.com.