Clive Maxfield has identified an application for FPGAs that is truly one of a kind – Xilinx Spartan-3 devices in an Opal Kelly module, used in a US Postal Service OCR mail sorter. Maxfield writes about the system in the latest Chip Design.

We’ve talked a lot about the move of FPGAs into video processing applications, but the utility of real-time processing in high-speed OCR is often forgotten in our video-centric world. As Maxfield tells us in his intriguing story, the USPS goal in this case was not merely to be in the forefront of barcode recognition, but to save the taxpayer money by refurbishing older barcode systems where possible.

Jerry Pender of USPS was tasked with finding a “green” solution to re-use Carrier Sequence Bar Code Sorters, so they could be used in a more centralized hub topology of mail sorting. Only highly-parallelized programmable architectures could process the recognition algorithms in real-time, yet USPS also needed a simple PC interface, and opted for USB 2.0. The USPS team chose a Spartan-based Opal Kelly module for the job.

Maxfield’s story ranks as one of the better FPGA case studies of the year, and certainly as one pointing to a niche application quite unlike any other in programmable fields.