VMETRO FPGA Design Kit accelerates DSP development for Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs

VMETRO in Houston and Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc. in Kirkland, Wash., are releasing a digital signal processor (DSP) development kit called the V5+C for rapid prototyping and algorithm development. The kit, which includes an Impulse C-to-VHDL compiler tool, and a VMETRO PMC module based on the Xilinx Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA), enables military and industrial system developers to hardware-accelerate DSP algorithms and prototype on FPGAs within an ANSI C environment. With the V5+C kit, software application developers who are unfamiliar with low-level VHDL design methods can move ANSI C algorithms to an FPGA-accelerated platform. Experienced hardware developers benefit from a fast path to a working prototype from high-level C code. A benefit of the Impulse C compiler is its ability automatically to analyze, optimize, and translate the original C code to run in parallel on an FPGA to take advantage of the inherent parallel capabilities of FPGA devices. The VMETRO PMC-FPGA05 included in the V5+C kit is a PMC module with a large-capacity Xilinx Virtex-5 XC5VLX110 FPGA and customizable digital front-panel I/O. The FPGA is boosted by several banks of QDR and DDR memory to make the most of processing capabilities of the PMC-FPAGA05. For more information, contact VMETRO online at www.vmetro.com.