The Toshiba MeP Development Kit has been chosen as the design platform and environment for a nationwide digital media SoC design challenge.

Celoxica’s Toshiba MeP (Media Embedded Processor) Development Kit has been chosen as the design platform and environment for a nationwide digital media SoC design challenge. This announcement is the dividend of years of collaboration and investment made by Celoxica, Toshiba and the Japanese VLSI Design and Education Centre (VDEC) into semiconductor solutions and system level design for very complex system-on-chip (SoC) design. Selected by the VLSI Design and Education Centre (VDEC), the central hub of Japanese university expertise for VLSI technology, research, teaching and development, Celoxica’s technology was chosen as the most fit-for-purpose and usable solution.

It will be used by teams of specialist SoC developers to create award winning designs around Toshiba’s MeP architecture.

Due to the levels of complexity and performance involved with such designs, the robust SoC prototyping and validation features of Celoxica’s technology were cited as key factors in VDEC’s decision.

Celoxica’s Toshiba MeP Development Kit provides a comprehensive package of ESL design tools, programmable hardware platforms and utilities to help designers develop high performance SoC designs.

As well as offering MeP processor IP, the kit is fully integrated into Toshiba’s MeP design flow to enable the rapid creation and validation of complex designs from algorithmic models.

Supplied with the Kit is Celoxica’s award winning DK Design Suite of system design tools, video IP and application programming interfaces (APIs).

‘VDEC has been pleased with the use of Celoxica design tools and boards for many years’, said Dr Kunihiro Asada, Director of VDEC.

‘We now need to embrace and meet the challenges of ever more complex semiconductor design and need a configurable platform solution to do this’.

‘Our selection of solutions from Celoxica and Toshiba will help meet the needs of future SoC design education’.

Toshiba’s configurable processor MeP core has already been deployed into mass volume products such as DVD players, intelligent vehicles and other very high performance image processing systems.

Its inherent configurability reduces turn around and delivers architectures optimised to the application or customer specification.

Toshiba will sponsor a prise for the winning design and it is anticipated that the design will be taken through to silicon fabrication.

‘It is an honour to be selected as the technology platform provider for such a prestigious and demanding design challenge’, said Dr Stephen Chappell, General Manager and Representative Director of Celoxica Japan.

‘This decision reflects not only on the investment we have made into our technology, but also the relationships with corporations and organisations at the forefront of advanced electronics design’.

After completion of the design challenge VDEC expects to roll out the platform solution to over 150 Japanese universities and 640 research groups who are part of the VDEC network.

Application kit interfaces a RabbitCore module with MaxStream XBee wireless ZigBee modules.

Available now from Rabbit Semiconductor, the company’s ZigBee/802.15.4 application kit interfaces a RabbitCore module with MaxStream XBee wireless ZigBee modules. Adding ZigBee technology to an Ethernet enabled Rabbit embedded control device offers a low-cost, robust wireless infrastructure that allows users to monitor remote devices within a sophisticated wireless network, exchange data between devices, and control I/O from a secured PC on the Internet. As the latest emerging wireless standard, ZigBee is positioned for widespread integration in embedded applications.

ZigBee, known for its reliable, low-cost, low-power features, builds on the established IEEE802.15.4 standard.

Rabbit’s ZigBee/802.15.4 Application Kit is a reference application that comes complete with the hardware and software for implementing a ZigBee wireless control network in the various topologies such as point-to-point and point-to-multipoint.

The simple to use configuration software allows users to set up a network, discover nodes, and establish communications between similar ZigBee devices.

The RabbitCore module acts as the network co-ordinator to monitor and manage two other battery-powered XBee-equipped node devices.

This allows users to access and control a ZigBee/802.15.4 network from anywhere in the world.

The RabbitCore module is equipped with Ethernet and 512Kbyte Flash, 256Kbyte SRAM, 1Mbyte serial Flash and 33 GPIO lines, and has the ability to act as both an intelligent control device or as an Ethernet gateway.

Enea and MontaVista Software have joined forces to create the industry’s most comprehensive, highly integrated software platform for distributed telecomms applications.
Enea and MontaVista Software have joined forces to create the industry’s most comprehensive, highly integrated software platform for distributed telecomms applications. The new high-availability, fault tolerant platform, known as the Network Application Services Platform (NASP), provides a telecomms-in-a-box solution for developing, deploying and managing distributed telecomms applications spanning multiple operating systems, CPUs, DSPs, interconnects and shelf architectures. The NASP combines MontaVista’s Linux operating system products (Carrier Grade Edition or Professional Edition) with Enea’s high-availability Element middleware, Polyhedra fault-tolerant database and Eclipse-based development tools.

The NASP is also available with Enea’s OSE and OSEck RTOSs for distributed telecomms infrastructure environments that require a heterogeneous OS solution.

The NASP uses Enea’s recently announced Linx open source interprocess communications (IPC) services to facilitate transparent, high-performance communications between NASP components and applications across multiple OS and CPU/DSP boundaries.

‘As network equipment providers turn to outsourcing to cut costs and reduce time to market, product line breadth and integration level are becoming increasingly critical’, said Johan Wall, President and CEO at Enea.

‘By working closely with MontaVista, and leveraging our new Linx IPC, we have been able to create an out-of-the-box Linux-based platform with enhanced real-time control, signal processing, middleware and database capabilities that greatly simplifies the development, deployment, management, servicing and upgrading of large-scale high-availability distributed telecomms systems’.

‘MontaVista Software is pleased to partner with Enea to offer the industry’s most complete integrated telecomms solution’, said Jim Ready, CEO of MontaVista Software.

‘We think NEPs who are looking to deploy complex distributed systems in a timely, cost effective fashion will find this platform very compelling’.

The NASP provides a versatile platform for deploying a broad range of high-availability applications, from supervisory control and enterprise management software, to DSP-based media processing applications.

The NASP supports a variety of OS configurations, from stand-alone Linux, to hybrid configurations using Linux, OSE and OSEck.

The three OSs can be deployed in any topology across multiple shelves and blades, and even on the same multicore device.

Built atop this versatile OS platform is Element, Enea’s high-availability middleware and application development framework.

Element’s Linx-based communications services make it easy to develop complex distributed applications and partition them across multiple processors and operating systems.

Element also provides instrumentation, fault management, upgrade management, and shelf management services that make it easy to monitor, provision, service, upgrade, and fine tune distributed networks.

Also built atop this versatile OS platform is Enea’s Polyhedra database, which simplifies the management and sharing of secure data throughout distributed systems.

Polyhedra is an active, fault-tolerant SQL relational database management system (RDBMS), which uses a memory-resident design to boosts performance by up to an order of magnitude relative to conventional disk- and Flash-based RDBMSs.

Polyhedra also provides journaling and fault-tolerant mechanisms such as failover control and fast reconnection that ensure data persistence and enhance system availability.

Enea’s message-based Linx IPC provides the communications framework for NASP components and applications that utilise NASP services.

These services enables processes running on multiple CPUs, DSPs and operating systems to communicate with each other across diverse media (including gigabit Ethernet, RapidIO, PCI and shared memory) as if they were running on the same CPU under the same OS.

Hunt Engineering has released a USB based module carrier for its Heron range of products.
Hunt Engineering has released a USB based module carrier for its Heron range of products. Heron-Base2 offers a low cost but fully featured option in the Heron range allowing users of Heron modules to connect to their PC via High Speed USB 2.0. This allows the systems to be used alongside laptop computers as well as the desktop computers that have previously used a PCI connection.

Any existing Heron module with Xilinx FPGA, TI DSP and fast I/O can be plugged into the Heron-Base2.

The USB connection on Heron-Base2 is supported via Hunt Engineering’s Host API software which allows applications and tools on the host machine to access Heron hardware.

Users do not need to understand or program the Heron-Base2 or USB directly in order to do this.

Applications written for PCI based carriers can very simply be retargeted to Heron-Base2 and vice versa.

FIFO connections on the Heron-Base2 can be used to stream data to or from the modules in the system - either between the modules in the system or between module and USB.

The Heron Base2 can also be used as a stand-alone unit.

The SMT368 promises DSP professionals, system integrators, ASIC designers, digital design and prototyping engineers the ideal platform for their work and to help speed their products to market.
A new compact DSP TIM, the SMT368, from Sundance Multiprocessor Technology, pushes the boundaries for performance. The board features the new Xilinx Virtex-4 SX35 FPGA with 192 XtremeDSP slices, each capable of operating at 500MHz throughput. The SMT368 promises DSP professionals, system integrators, ASIC designers, digital design and prototyping engineers the ideal platform for their work and to help speed their products to market.

A copious 35,000 logic cells are available for customer designs, allowing them to create complex functions such as hundreds of intermediate frequency (IF) to baseband down conversions in radio applications.

A 128x chip rate greatly enhances the design process of digital systems using spread spectrum techniques.

The SMT368 is also highly capable for high definition H.264 and MPEG-4 encode/decode algorithms.

Measuring only 105 x 65mm and weighing in at a measly 58g the board is easy to integrate in any application.

In a modular TIM system, the SMT368 integrates with a large range of other DSP/FPGA modules and it is easy to connect to and interface with a host computer.

In addition, the SLB (Sundance LVDS bus) interface provides connection for Sundance mezzanine boards such as ADC and DAC modules for data acquisition or software radio systems.

Commenting for Sundance, Flemming Christensen, Sundance Managing Director said: ‘Time to market is a key concern for all developers’.

‘The SMT368 is made for high productivity and to shorten development times’.

Hitex has teamed up with the leading compiler vendors to offer a variety of tested and proven bundles of professional debugger and compiler packages.
The increasing functionality and complexity of microprocessor architectures as well as development tools results in a growing demand for complete solutions for projects. For this reason Hitex has teamed up with the leading compiler vendors to offer a variety of tested and proven bundles of professional debugger and compiler packages. This guarantees that the tools work together flawlessly and the well-known Hitex support is available for any questions arising from the use of the tool chain.

Hitex is now offering attractively priced development tools bundles.

These special packages are particularly essential for development engineers looking for a tested and qualified development tool chain.

All the powerful sets consist of a proven Hitex debugger together with a professional compiler package and are available directly from Hitex.

Nallatech has introduced four products in its COTS FPGA computing range, combining the processing and I/O performance of Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs with enhancements to its DIME-II architecture.
Nallatech has introduced four products in its COTS FPGA computing range, combining the processing and I/O performance of Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs with enhancements to its DIME-II architecture, including host interface improvements and enhanced clocking. Part of Nallatech’s strategic product road map, these products extend performance density for customers demanding the full capabilities of Virtex-4 in high performance embedded computing (HPEC) applications, including surveillance and reconnaissance, software defined radio and signal intelligence. Nallatech’s announcement includes the BenNUEY-PCI-X, a PCI-X DIME-II motherboard with on-board Virtex-4 FX FPGA and three DIME-II expansion sites.

Three FPGA computing modules complete the new product set - the BenBLUE-V4 dual-FPGA processing engine, BenDATA-V4 mixed memory and digital I/O module, and BenADC-V4 ultra-high-speed analogue capture module.

Nallatech’s modules provide the option of Virtex-4 LX FPGAs with high performance logic capability, or the Virtex-4 SX family optimised for DSP performance.

This allows developers to optimise FPGA hardware resources to meet their precise requirements across a diverse number of applications, ranging from radar to bioinformatics.

By identifying the full capabilities of Virtex-4 at the design stage, Nallatech has been able to ensure its customers can easily access all the features and performance of the FPGA architecture.

Fully integrated hardware and software support for all platforms of the Virtex-4 family enhance performance in the end application and ease of design for customers.

Nallatech’s roadmap for its Virtex-4 products includes support for industry standard form factors, including cPCI, VME, PCI and PCI-104 - delivering up to 8 Virtex-4 FPGAs on a single COTS FPGA computing platform.

The BenNUEY-PCI-X is the third generation of the BenNUEY series of PCI cards and the first to offer the 1Gbyte/s host bandwidth of the PCI-X bus.

An on-board Virtex-4 FX60 or FX100 provides the ideal balance of programmable resources for processing and system management, while three DIME-II expansion slots allow users to optimise system resources to meet processing, memory and I/O requirements.

The BenBLUE-V4 features dual Virtex-4 LX100 or LX160 FPGAs, 64 Mbyte DDR2 SRAM, implemented on an enhanced DIME-II architecture.

The BenDATA-V4 features a Virtex-4 LX or SX alongside 16 Mbytes DDR2 SRAM and 1 Gbyte DDR-II SDRAM.

By using the latest DDR2 SRAM and DDR-II SDRAM, Nallatech’s memory sub-systems increase bandwidth by more than 275% compared with previous modules using technologies such as ZBT SRAM.

This allows system designers to satisfy higher processing demands, use fewer processing modules, reduce hardware dimensions and simplify integration.

The BenADC-V4 ultra-high-speed analogue capture module combines the Virtex-4 SX or LX and 16 Mbytes DDR2 SRAM with four independent analogue inputs feeding four 12bit 250 MSPS ADC channels.

This will allow developers to capture, digitise, analyse and manipulate multi-channel or complex signals in real time, using lightweight, low-footprint hardware with lower overall power requirements than DSP farms or other large multi-processor arrays.

‘The Virtex-4 architecture has tremendous I/O and processing capability, and will outstrip peripherals that cannot satisfy its appetite for data’, said Craig Sanderson, Product Manager at Nallatech.

‘We therefore focused on creating peripheral subsystems to match the performance of the Virtex-4 family, in addition to maximising parameters such as memory bandwidth, thereby delivering the highest returns for customers investing in Virtex-4 platforms’.

These new Virtex-4 solutions enable developers to use the full potential of the Xilinx Virtex-4 architecture, and represent a significant milestone in Nallatech’s aggressive product road map which combines best in class enhancements to the DIME-II architecture with the latest industry standards including PCI-X, and extended hardware and software support.

Nallatech is focusing on introducing DIME-II Virtex-4 family members in line with this road map, to support developers utilising its products in all industry standard form factors.

Development boards and tool bundles of the FT series are discounted by 30% off regular retail prices.
Development boards and tool bundles of the FT series are discounted by 30% off regular retail prices. The three development boards of the FT Series are based on the MSP430F169 microcontroller and feature: RS232, USB, coin cell battery back-up with supervisor IC for uninterrupted switching between USB and battery power, JTAG header, BST (bootloader) header, 4 LEDs, 2 user switches, prototyping area and IDC headers for access to all MSP430 pins. The boards differ in the way the USB interface is connected to the MSP430 microcontroller: The FT232’s USB interface chip connects to the MSP430’s integrated UART, the FT245’s USB connects to a MSP430 parallel port (FIFO interface); and the FT2232 version allows you to connect the USB either to the MSP430’s UART or a parallel port.

All three boards are available stand-alone or as bundles that include either a parallel- or a USB-port JTAG in-circuit debugger and programmer that supports all MSP430 microcontrollers and is compatible with TI’s free MSP430 Kickstart software.

Development boards and tool bundles of the BFT series are discounted by 10% off regular retail prices.

The two development boards of the BFT series are also based on the MSP430F169 microcontroller, but come in a DIP module form-factor that allows you to plug it into solderless breadboards or your own board design for rapid prototyping.

The boards feature USB (BFT245: parallel port; BFT232: UART), JTAG connector, voltage supervisor, 32kHz Xtal (for low speed oscillator) and LED on pin P1.0.

Both the BFT245 and BFT232 boards are also available as bundles with either a parallel- or a USB-port MSP430 JTAG in-circuit debugger and programmer.

A new development platform contains all hardware and tools required for software-defined radio development compliant with the Software Communication Architecture for all future US military radios.
Pentek has released a development platform containing all hardware and tools required for software-defined radio development compliant with the Software Communication Architecture (SCA) mandated for all future US military radios. The Pentek SCA 2510 hardware platform consists of a Pentek 7640 software radio transceiver PCI card installed in a PC workstation. The computer is loaded with the Linux operating system, development tools and the SCARI++ SCA core framework from Communications Research Centre (CRC) Canada.

The hardware and software are fully integrated to ease development.

The PCI card comes preconfigured with drivers and libraries so developers can immediately begin their software-defined radio projects.

‘Creating a reconfigurable radio that’s adaptable to many radio standards - without the need to replace hardware - is what JTRS is all about’, says Pentek Vice President Rodger Hosking.

‘The SCA2510 development system with fully integrated SCA tools and core framework already in place helps JTRS hardware and software engineers reach that goal’.

‘We married a high-performance PCI transceiver card and an extensive set of supporting software libraries to the industry’s most comprehensive suite of SCA development tools’.

‘The end result is a powerful, cost-effective PC-based system that extends the reach of JTRS software radio development to companies that might not have been able to afford it before’.

‘SCA technology is a key enabler to facilitate communications interoperability among military, police and rescue-relief teams’, says Claude Belisle, acting Vice-President of Satellite Communications and Radio Propagation Research at CRC.

‘We are pleased to be working with industry leaders such as Pentek in the development of SDR products’.

The Model 7640 dual channel transceiver PCI board digitises HF or IF input signals using a pair of 14bit, 105MHz A/D convertors and generates output signals with two 16bit, 500MHz D/A convertors.

The 7640 is also equipped with a Virtex-II Pro VP50 FPGA that serves as a control and status engine with data and programming interfaces to each of the many onboard resources, including a four-channel digital downconvertor, a digital upconvertor and an extremely versatile clocking and synchronisation system.

The FPGA is supported with a total of 512Mbyte DDR SDRAM for built-in buffering functions, including data capture and delay.

A 64bit 66MHz PCI interface includes a high-performance nine-channel DMA controller to boost PCIbus transfer speeds.

The SCA2510 software development environment is based on the SCARI++ SCA Core Framework, Component Development Library and Software Defined Radio (SDR) Development Toolset.

This toolset is integrated with Pentek’s SCA-compatible board support package for a complete development solution ready for radio and waveform designers.

Pentek offers the GateFlow FPGA design Kit, a package that includes design information, software files and utilities for extending the base functionality of the Virtex-II Pro FPGA on the Model 7640.

compared with proprietary development platforms, the use of a PC-based hardware platform, Linux operating system and CRC’s SCA software greatly reduces the cost of entry for potential developers.

The PC workstation and Pentek 7640 PCI rival the performance of larger multi-board system alternatives while reducing hardware costs.

Nevertheless, since the Model 7640 architecture is identical to the 7140 PMC/XMC module, all development efforts can easily be scaled to large, multi-channel VME and cPCI systems ranging from commercial through conduction-cooled environments.

Support for the development platform also helps reduce the cost of entry by offering complete training and maintenance.

Pentek provides first-line support for the hardware platform and hardware-software integration issues.

CRC will train customers on the SCA and development tools and will provide ongoing upgrades and tool maintenance.

Pentek’s SCA 2510 development platform starts at $85,000 for all hardware and software tools for the first development seat.

Discounts are available for additional seats.

Product availability is approximately 12 weeks ARO.

New from Goepel Electronic at Productronica 2005 was a series of high-performance low cost JTAG/boundary scan controllers.
New from Goepel Electronic at Productronica 2005 is a series of high-performance low cost JTAG/boundary scan controllers. The new product family, named ScanBooster, complements the existing spectrum of Scanflex solutions by an independent product range in the lower to mid-range performance area. The first family member is the ScanBooster/PCI, a JTAG/boundary scan controller on PCIbus basis for test, PLD programming and Flash in-system programming.

‘With this new range of controllers we are now able to provide an optimal solution in particular for standard applications with high cost pressure and lower performance requirements’, says Bettina Becker, Marketing and International Sales Manager for Goepel Electronic.

‘Because of the extended product assortment we are the exclusive vendor of one-stop solutions in all performance and price categories’.

The ScanBooster/PCI is equipped with two separate taps and supports a programmable frequency up to 16MHz.

Both taps are independently programmable with regard to output voltage, input voltage, output impedance and input impedance.

By utilising Goepel Electronic’s Cion ASICs as driver circuit, the TAPs have outstanding good signal integrity in combination with special features for interface protection.

The controller offers additional resources such as dynamic 32bit parallel I/O, trigger signals, an SCP bus for system extensions and a specific interface for parallel gang testing of up to eight UUT.

The new controllers are interface compatible with former hardware generations.

Previously developed test programs can be cross compatible on each Scanflex platform without recompilation.

The ScanBooster/PCI is fully supported by the industry leading boundary scan software System Cascon.

System Cascon is the only integrated development environment with a specific mixed signal boundary scan programming language (Caslan) for IEEE1149.1/IEEE1149.4 including more than 30 tools for automated test program generation (ATPG), pin failure diagnostics (PFD), in-system programming (ISP) as well as extensive verification through debugging at schematic and layout level.