News and New Products

Quad signal processors top new mezzanine card

By Warren Webb -- EDN, 12/17/2004

BittWare recently announced the T2-PMC, a multiprocessor PCI Mezzanine Card featuring four Analog Devices (www.analog.com) ADSP-TS201 TigerSHARC DSPs, a Xilinx (www.xilinx.com) Virtex-II Pro FPGA, and multiple high-bandwidth I/O interfaces (Picture). In addition to a total of 14.4 GFLOPS of floating-point processing power, the TigerSHARC’s architecture allows the T2PM to also achieve 57.5 BOPS of 16-bit fixed-point performance. BittWare integrates this processing performance with 24 Mbits of on-chip RAM per DSP and four high-speed LVDS link ports operating as fast as 1 Gbytes/sec each. The T2-PMC interconnects two link ports from each DSP to create an interprocessor-communications ring, and the other two are routed to the onboard FPGA for I/O.

The T2-PMC implements a scalable architecture, ATLANTiS (Advanced Transfer Link Architecture for New TigerSHARC), which enables system designers to use software to configure their hardware. Jeffry Milrod, president of BittWare, says “The versatility of the PCI Mezzanine Card with the power of TigerSHARCs and our ATLANTiS architecture gives engineers exceptional flexibility in their designs.”

BittWare offers complete software support for the T2-PMC, including software tools, interface libraries, and a variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools. The T2-PMC is available now, and prices start at $8595.

BittWare Inc, 1-603-226-0404, www.bittware.com.