News and New Products

FPGA development kit targets designs that "race"

By Jeff Berman, News Editor -- EDN, 4/28/2005

Mercury Computer Systems has rolled out a development kit supporting the company's FPGA computing systems that employ the company's high-speed Race++ switch fabric. The FDK (FPGA Compute Node Developer's Kit) 2.0 platform, which includes software, intellectual property (IP), and design consultation, offers the interconnect, communications, command and control, memory, and I/O functions needed for flexibility and quick deployment, according to the company.

The kit supports the company's IP cores for the Race-on-Chip, or RoC high-bandwidth interconnect, a patent-pending technology that extends the fabric inside the FPGA to access other IP cores, such as high-speed DRAM, SRAM, sensor I/O, and system-level fabric interfaces, according to the company. The kit supports the PCI-based VantageRT FCN and VME-based MCJ6 FCN systems. Both of those products feature multimillion-gate Xilinx FPGAs connected to Race++, which is Mercury's implementation of the industry-standard Raceway Interlink high-performance interconnect fabric.

Rich Jaenicke, Mercury's director of product management, said FDK 2.0 helps users load bitstreams into their FPGA and IP, providing an FPGA interface to components like memories, switch fabric, and I/O. "Users have data streaming from a sensor into an I/O interface and are computing and storing data in memory, and [then] sending results over the switch fabric," Jaenicke said. "We are providing infrastructure interfaces, which are helpful for our customers, because this allows them to focus on algorithms and not have to spend time on infrastructure." Engineers will also find the kit beneficial because it includes a dual DMA master/slave switch-fabric endpoint. "Switch fabrics are all the rage now, and this IP says we have the switch fabric and all the protocol layers are provided directly on the chip," Jaenicke said. FDK 2.0 is available now and is priced at $23,000 for the first development seat, which includes 20 hours of development support.

Mercury Computer Systems, www.mc.com.