concord, nh – February 25, 2009 – BittWare, Inc., the leading supplier of signal processing COTS boards, is pleased to announce they have adopted the VITA 57 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) standard on their new “S4” family of board-level signal processing solutions. FMC provides an industry standard for expanding processing or I/O via mezzanine cards that connect to FPGA(s) on the carrier card. Electrically, the FMC connector supports high-speed serial (SerDes) ports, LVDS, clocks, and single ended signaling, providing a wide range of options and flexibility to the user. Similarly, the mechanical format of the FMC supports a variety of standard carrier board formats including AdvancedMC (AMC), VME, VXS, and VPX, and can be air-cooled or conduction-cooled. The addition of an FMC site on BittWare’s S4 family of FPGA boards, based on Altera Corporation’s 40-nm Stratix® IV FPGAs, allows customers to support an extremely broad range of applications simply by adding specific I/O or processing via various FMCs. Coupled with BittWare’s ATLANTiS™ FrameWork (AFW) for FPGAs, the FMCs also facilitate design reuse of FPGA implementations that will decrease time-to-market, while also lowering costs across multiple programs. In addition to supporting VITA 57 on their S4 family of signal processing hardware, BittWare will also be releasing their own family of FMCs for I/O and processing expansion.
“Flexibility is one of the most important features of a COTS board, and our adoption of VITA 57, or FMC, greatly improves the flexibility of our next generation of products,” stated Jeff Milrod, CEO and President at BittWare. “When using FPGAs in signal processing applications, it can be challenging to add additional processing and I/O that may be required to implement a complete solution – FMCs solve that problem on our S4 family of boards.”
“FMC’s (FPGA Mezzanine Cards) are the cornerstone value-added technology of next-generation high-performance systems, especially in MIL/COTS applications,” said Ray Alderman, Executive Director of VITA. “BittWare’s adoption of VITA 57 and their ensuing products show they are in synch with the market demands.”
“BittWare’s FMC hardware provides designers easy access to the industry’s only available 40-nm FPGAs,” said Amr El-Ashmawi, senior manager of Altera’s military business unit. “Stratix IV FPGAs are used in the front end of advance sensor designs to implement complex I/O interfaces, execute in-stream data processing, and even run user algorithms. The additional option of an FMC will take our customers’ designs to a new level, giving them many more options for I/O interfacing with our Stratix IV FPGAs, and for incorporating additional FPGA processing when needed.”
About the “S4” Family of Products
At the heart of the S4 family of signal processing hardware is an Altera Stratix IV GX FPGA which provides unparalleled performance and flexibility. Each on-board FPGA supports 530K equivalent logic elements, 20.3 Mbits of RAM, and 1,024 embedded multipliers. On-board connections to the FPGA also provide up to 27 full-duplex, multi-gigabit transceivers – 24 of which support data rate speeds of 8.5 Gbps. The FPGA supports a number of protocols, including PCI Express Gen1 and Gen2 and Serial RapidIO.
BittWare’s ATLANTiS™ FrameWork provides the Stratix IV GX FPGA with fully validated board-level physical interfaces to I/O, communications, and memory, along with DMA engines and resource arbitration, greatly simplifying application development and integration. A standard, open data interconnect fabric implemented using Altera’s streaming Avalon interface allows the ATLANTiS modules to be easily connected. Similarly, a standard control fabric using memory-mapped Avalon allows ATLANTiS modules to be easily controlled and coordinated. The ATLANTiS FrameWork frees users of BittWare’s signal processing hardware from having to reinvent low-level IP for the FPGA, and allows them to focus on the development of their application’s unique processing and I/O requirements.
BittWare’s FINe™ Bridge implements a complete host/control bridge for the S4 product family with extensive software support, thus removing that complexity from the data plane, I/O, and processing implemented on the Stratix IV GX FPGA.
The first product in the S4 Family is the S4-AMC (S4AM), a mid-size, single wide AdvancedMC. The family will also include a 3U VPX board, and a 6U VPX board – all with on-board VITA 57-compliant FMC sites.
Complete Development Support
BittWare offers a complete suite of development tools to make developing and debugging applications for the S4 family easy and efficient. These software tools provide host interface libraries, a wide variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools, and debug tools. This tool set is comprised of BittWare’s DSP21k Toolkit, and DSP21k Porting Kit.
Availability
BittWare will begin shipping Early Access Units of the S4AM to its lead customer late April 2009, with OEM quantities available in June priced at $5,000. The VPX S4 boards (3U and 6U) will be available in Q209 and Q409 respectively.
About BittWare, Inc.
Founded in 1989, BittWare, Inc. is the leading designer and manufacturer of hybrid (FPGA and DSP) board-level solutions based on Altera’s FPGA s and Analog Devices’ TigerSHARC® technology. The company provides the essential building blocks required by OEMs for developing and deploying their innovative systems in defense, communications, instrumentation, and life sciences applications. BittWare’s product offering addresses OEM needs from prototype-to-production and span a variety of platforms, including AMC, VME/VPX, PCI, CompactPCI, PMC and standalone. For more information on BittWare and its innovative DSP and FPGA solutions, visit www.bittware.com.