FPGA Gurus

So here we are talking about the central relevance of PCI Express to various realms outside the enterprise data center, and along comes Agilent Technologies Inc. and plunks down a PCIe data-acquisition card for digitization at up to 4 gigasamples a second. The 8-bit U1084A Acqiris (that’s right, digitizer cards get fancy names now) is based on the Xilinx Virtex-5. Agilent chose an FPGA not merely due to chip speed and efficiency of PCIe IP cores, but also to take advantage of re-programmability for customized post-acquisition tasks.

See how this works in medical imaging, intelligence/surveillance, test and data acquisition? The FPGA is chosen as a tactical alternative to a DSP, ASSP, or ASIC, but ends up allowing easier firmware tweaking for custom applications. It makes me more convinced all the time that microcontrollers or DSPs will have to add more programmable blocks for specialized applications, or risk being largely displaced by FPGAs. And as was pointed out in the previous blog post, PCI Express and FPGA I/O represent as natural partners as FPGA I/O and 1/10/40/100-Gbit Ethernet.

By the way, as with most parallel interfaces today, the PCIe Acqiris uses a four-lane interface with a data throughput of 650 Mbits/sec. Agilent has the card aimed at applications ranging from ATE equipment for mixed-signal semiconductors, to real-time acquisition in astrophysics. Cool stuff.