HOUSTON, 22 May 2007. 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 tools 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.
The V5+C kit extends the ability to develop DSP algorithms in ANSI C by enabling C applications to directly interface to VMETRO-provided hardware IP blocks, eliminating the need for developers to use VHDL to interface their hardware-accelerated algorithms to the VMETRO's IP blocks for the Virtex-5 FPGA.
The V5+C kit includes a PMC-FPGA05 on a PCI-X carrier card along with the Impulse C tools and PSP. Early adopters of this kit receive special factory training and design support on their first algorithm. For more information contact VMETRO online at www.vmetro.com.
