News and New Products

FPGA board suits streaming-communications applications

By Warren Webb, Technical Editor -- EDN, 7/12/2007

Targeting high-performance streaming-system applications, such as telecommunications-protocol analysis, software-defined radio, and real-time-video processing, Embedded Systems Design recently announced the StreamBlade SOE-4 short-form PCI card featuring two Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs or two Virtex-4 FX100 FPGAs. The SOE-4 implements Ethernet as a distributed-computer backplane, and the PCI bus handles only power, configuration, and control. The SOE-4 supports four independent GbE (gigabit-Ethernet) ports plus four ATA connectors, which provide for direct user-configurable access to both FPGAs. With two 8-Mbyte banks of zero-bus-turnaround SRAM and two 128-Mbyte banks of SDRAM per FPGA, developers can use the SOE-4 as a quad PowerPC 405 processing board, a as a pure-FPGA-processing board, or for combined hardware/software-boundary processing. The board comes with a development kit that includes sample applications, FPGA reference designs, Linux PCI device drivers, and host utilities for loading FPGA bit streams and executable files into flash memory. With two Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FX60 FPGAs, the StreamBlade SOE-4 costs $6800 (single quantities). Delivery is eight weeks after receipt of order.