Cumbernauld, UK, & Baltimore, MD—May 18, 2005— In the latest development resulting from Nallatech’s strategic relationship with Xilinx, Nallatech today announced the completion of the Virtex™-4 XtremeDSP™ Development Kit, which will enable designers to immediately leverage Xilinx new DSP-rich Virtex™-4 SX FPGAs in new advanced FPGA designs.
The Virtex™-4 XtremeDSP™ Development Kit is equipped with a SX35 Virtex™-4 FPGA, which has 192 XtremeDSP™ slices, where each slice is capable of operating at 400MHz providing performance up to 77 GigaMACs/second (using 18×18 multipliers). The Virtex™-4 SX FPGA also features additional embedded memory capacity, featuring 3,456Kbits internal RAM and 15,360 logic slices as well as supporting low power performance ideally suiting the board for high performance DSP designs for 3G wireless, video encoding and decoding, including H.264 or MPEG-4, radar and beam forming applications.
The Virtex™-4 XtremeDSP™ Development Kit leverages Nallatech’s modular DIME-II architecture for high performance FPGA systems, and includes the dual mode BenONE DIME-II USB and PCI motherboard populated with a BenADDA-V4 DIME-II module. The BenADDA-V4 is an analog data processing board, which is equipped with a Xilinx SX35 Virtex™-4 FPGA device. The FPGA processing capability on the BenADDA-V4 is complemented by four high performance analog interfaces consisting of two 14-bit ADC channels capable of 105MSPS sampling per channel, plus two 14-bit DACs with 160 MSPS sampling per channel. The BenADDA-V4 also features 4MBytes ZBT SRAM on-board for high-speed buffering and data storage. The kit comes with a range of IP including memory controllers, BIST and examples designs, allowing rapid configuration of high-speed memory subsystems and design implementation. Also included is Nallatech’s FUSE system software which helps designers quickly control and configure the board via software. The systems communication design tool DIMEtalk, is also available, simplifying the migration of designs developed on the Virtex™-4 SX35 XtremeDSP™ Development Kit to multiple FPGAs.
The new kit is supported by the Xilinx System Generator v7.1 software for DSP design tool, which enables designers to easily model and implement high performance DSP systems within an FPGA, using the MATLAB / Simulink design environments and the extensive Xilinx DSP IP libraries. The System Generator software also supports integration to the Microblaze soft processor cores and Chipscope Pro for system debug. These features combined with the performance capabilities of the Virtex™-4™ SX FPGA makes it simple for a designer to harness the parallel processing performance of an FPGA
Xilinx and Nallatech have a history of bringing to market comprehensive development kits for digital communications and signal processing applications. The Virtex™-4 SX35 platform builds on the success of the popular VirtexTM-II and VirtexTM-II Pro XtremeDSP™ development kits, which Xilinx has been shipping since 2002.
“Nallatech is a valued member of Xilinx Alliance Program and has well-established credentials as a high-performance processing specialist able to extract the maximum performance from today’s flexible and powerful FPGAs,” said David Squires, Director of Marketing, DSP Division at Xilinx. “Its engineers have very quickly created a solution that makes the power of Virtex™-4 and XtremeDSP™ readily available to high-performance communication and surveillance applications requiring multi-channel, high-throughput, memory intensive capabilities.”
“Nallatech continues to lead the way in the development and delivery of FPGA technologies that will address today’s most demanding high-performance computing needs and the integration of the Virtex™-4 architecture is an important step in this on going effort,” said Dr.Malachy Devlin, Nallatech’s chief technology officer. “The completion of the Virtex™-4 XtremeDSP™ Development Kit begins the rollout of Nallatech’s next generation of high-performance computing solutions that will feature the latest Xilinx technology.”
About Nallatech
Nallatech is the world’s leading supplier of high performance FPGA solutions. A comprehensive product range delivers the highest performance-density, maximum scalability and most complete solutions available on the market today. Nallatech offers a unique high-speed architecture, combined with support for industry standard PCI, cPCI, PC/104 and VME, along with software support for the most popular operating systems and programming languages. Nallatech provides flexible, easy to implement solutions for Data Communications, Digital Signal and Image Processing. Customers benefit from lower costs, reduced power consumption and improved performance in end markets including Telecommunications Infrastructure, Aerospace and Defense, Imaging and Scientific Computing. Nallatech is headquartered in Glasgow, U.K., its wholly-owned subsidiary Nallatech, Inc. has U.S. group offices in Baltimore and regional offices in Phoenix, Philadelphia and Boston. For more information, please visit www.nallatech.com.
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