News and New Products

Customizable CPU platform combines DSP, FPGA

By Warren Webb, Technical Editor -- EDN, 3/6/2008

Critical Link recently announced the MityDSP-Pro customizable processing platform, which targets data- and processing-intensive applications, including embedded radar control and signal processing, high-data-rate real-time data acquisition, image processing, and fine-tolerance manufacturing test. The standard module integrates a 1.2-GHz Texas Instruments TMS320C6455 DSP with a Xilinx XC3S2000 Spartan 3 FPGA, flash-memory and DDR2 SDRAM subsystems, and support for four one-lane serial RapidIO links. Both the DSP and the FPGA can load and execute programs and logic images that end users develop.

“The MityDSP platform approach enables a project to begin with 80% of the work complete by using an off-the-shelf CPU module and existing interface designs,” says Tom Catalino, the company’s vice president. These elements quickly provide the combination for a custom application without the cost or scheduling problems of ground-up design, he says. The platform supports analog-to-digital, digital-to-analog, Ethernet, and general-purpose-I/O interfaces. The MityDSP-Pro standard-version module sells for $1295 (100).