CONCORD, NH – BittWare, designer and manufacturer of Altera-based FPGA platforms, announced today the release of version 1.8 of its BittWorks II Toolkit. BittWorks II is BittWare’s software development toolkit supporting its Arria V, Stratix V and soon-to-be released Arria 10 FPGA-based boards. Designed to make developing and debugging applications for BittWare’s boards easy and efficient, the Toolkit is a collection of libraries and applications that provides the glue between the host application and the hardware. The latest release of BittWorks II provides a seamless upgrade to BittWare’s new Linux PCI driver, BwPCI. Distributed with complete source code, BwPCI allows customers to modify kernel-level code to optimize their application performance. Users can create their own interrupt service routine for lower latency transactions without the need to create their own driver entirely. BwPCI includes installation scripts for RedHat and Debian Linux and is compatible with any PCI Express Vendor ID or Device ID.
“Our BittWorks II Toolkit software gives our customers a superior development environment for integrating their BittWare hardware into their systems,” said Ron Huizen, VP of Systems & Solutions. “We’ve put over two decades of design experience into creating this suite of tools, and our new PCIe driver adds another level of flexibility. Customers can now integrate the Toolkit even more tightly with their applications, getting their products to market even faster.”
“With this release, we’ve tried to address the most common customer requests. Some of these requests were to see the source code of the driver, to be able to use their own driver with our toolkit software, to have the ability to modify the actual interrupt service routine, and to be able to map system memory differently, such as using ‘write-combining’ or ‘cached’, to support low latency designs,” said David Hedstrom, Software Engineering Manager at BittWare. “BittWare has delivered on each of these requests with BwPCI. BwPCI comes with full source code and a user-side library so it can be merged with an existing driver. The user has complete freedom to change the way memory is mapped and how interrupts are serviced adding a lot of flexibility to the design process.”
BittWorks II Toolkit Features
The BittWorks II software tools provide a stable software base designed to get developers up and running on their BittWare boards quickly and efficiently. BittWorks II provides complete hardware and FPGA interfaces, which greatly reduces development time. The Toolkit includes the following libraries and utilities:
BwHIL: Cross-platform library of C-callable functions for controlling a local or remote BittWare board
BwConfig: Interface for finding, tracking and displaying information for all BittWare devices in a system
BwPCI: Linux PCIe driver with source
BwServer: Remote interface via a TCP/IP network for the BwHIL
BwShell: Interactive command-line shell for PHP scripting language with access to BwHIL API functions
BwMonitor: Interface for controlling the Board Management Controller (BMC) on a BittWare board
BmcLib: Function library to control the BMC on a BittWare board
BittWorks Porting Kit: (Optional) Source code and pre-built ports for porting the BittWare Toolkit to other operating systems
BittWorks II Toolkit Price and Availability
Version 1.8 of BittWare’s BittWorks II Toolkit software, which includes BwPCI, is available today for $1,995.
Arria is a registered trademark of Altera Corporation. All other products are the trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
About BittWare, Inc.
For over 25 years, BittWare has designed and deployed board-level solutions for network / packet processing, high performance computing and signal processing applications that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to revenue for our OEM customers. Our products are based on the latest FPGA technology from Altera and industry-standard COTS form factors including PCIe, VPX / OpenVPX, AMC, XMC and FMC (VITA 57). When customer requirements make it difficult to use industry-standard boards, BittWare can provide modified solutions, and/or licensed designs for applications in the financial, instrumentation military/aerospace/government and compute & storage markets. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA COTS solutions, visit www.bittware.com.