Cyclone IV visits Fort Meade
You knew, didn’t you, that when we began writing about the predominant role FPGAs were playing in crypto, they’d be showing up post haste at the doors of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md. Well, Altera Corp.’s Cyclone IV is there, courtesy of a KG-530 Sonet encryptor built by General Dynamics’ C4 Systems division.
William Jackson of Government Computer News provided the scoop on the contract award, saying that reprogrammability was key in allowing support of multiple encryption algorithms. NSA recomm...Read More
Display plays begin with Hong Kong research
FPGAs are commonplace in video processing platforms these days, but we’ve been expecting them to show up the display-control segments of higher-end digital television platforms as well. Some of the first examples may be showing up, as evidenced by Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute’s (ASTRI) use of the Xilinx Spartan-3A for dynamic LED backlighting control.
ASTRI is using the platform as a means of demonstrating the use of LEDs in LCDs for greater contrast and for lowering power consumption. C.J. Tsai, director of the LED program at ASTRI, said that FPGAs carry the advantage of being able to tailor the characteristics of LED control for the power and performance of particular customers.
Virtex, Spartan snare dual crypto design win
Xilinx’s Virtex-5 and Spartan-3 have both been chosen in a reference design for a cryptographic module. Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) will use the two FPGA architectures in the SASEBO-GII board, which the government agency will promote for cryptographic testing, according to Xilinx’s Japan subsidiary Xilinx KK.
In some senses, the design was no surprise, since SASEBO-G was based on the Virtex-II. But since the second generation reference design wa...Read More
Gene sequencing on the Virtex-5
And now for something completely different: According to the online genome-sequencing news site, Sequence, Stone Ridge Technology Inc. of Bel Air, MD has been awarded $150,000 from the National Science Foundation for a 2010 study of using reconfigurability in a bioinformatics test to perform first-stage alignment and mapping in gene-sequencing studies. Stone Ridge believes that by implementing an open-source dedicated algorithm on dual FPGAs, a PCI Express board would be able to perform first-stage sequencing 50 to 100 times faster than hardware based on a standard integer CPU.
While Stone Ridge has not indicated how closely the special-purpose platform will resemble its standard reconfigurable single-board computer, the company’s ...Read More
