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November 2011

Electronic System Level Tools Aim at Sundance Compile C code for Sundance FPGA Platforms Impulse C allows users of Sundance FPGA platforms to generate optimized VHDL or Verilog from C code and create FPGA software/hardware applications for easier and more efficient FPGA implementation. Visit ImpulseAccelerated.com or contact Impulse directly to find out how your C applications may be accelerated on an FPGA. Board support packages and C-based signal processing libraries are available for the Sundance SMT105 PCIe/104 and EVP6472 solutions.

EVP6472: Multicore DSP

(Twelve C64x+ processor cores)

Updates from SEED: XDS560 Emulators now Win64 Compatible To download the drivers, visit XDS560.com

XDS560v2: the New cost-effective solution for all DSP kits The new SEED-XDS560v2 is based on the XDS560v2 system trace reference design from Texas Instruments. The XDS560v2 design is the nextgeneration of high-performance XDS560-class technology.

SMT8121: Multichannel UWB (6U cPCI/PXI Software defined)

The SEED-XDS560v2 utilizes USB2.0 (480Mb/s) and Ethernet RJ45 (10/100Mb/s) ports for either local or remote debugging. It is supported by the latest Code Composer Studio versions (CCS4.x and CCS5.x), and is suitable for all the TI-based DSP systems including DM816x and C66xx.

Zoom in on LTE applications LTE-Advanced Features in LTE PHY Lab v2 Sundance's partner IS-Wireless announces the availability of the first LTE-Advanced baseband reference library for MATLAB LTE PHY Lab v.2.

MIMO 4x4 Developer's Board (LTE 2.4GHz and 5GHz ISM)

3GPP Release 8.

The product is released as a MATLAB Toolbox and brings new 3GPP Release 9 and 10 functionalities to the already wellestablished LTE PHY Lab v.1 implementing

LTE PHY Labs can be used at all stages of the software, hardware and IPR development, from research, prototyping and implementation, up to system benchmarking, verification and testing.

Dual MIMO WiMAX Channels

The LTE PHY Lab v2 is suitable to model LTE-Advanced algorithms on the dedicated Sundance MIMO Wireless development platforms: MIMO LTE 4x4 while the sibling WiMAX PHY Lab on the MIMO WiMAX platform.

(WiMAX 2.5GHz)

Series-7: 3U PXI Express | Series-1: PCI/104-Express | Series-C6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Rapid Developement Systems | FPGA developer's Kits University Program | Contact us

If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe. To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

http://www.sundance.com/enews/[30/11/2011 16:45:24]

Sundance Multiprocessor Technology | eNews

Edition: October 2011 Highlight: Optical Fibre Connectivity The fastest transmission links on Sundance's COTS modules Sundance has now upgraded its range of embedded solutions to include faster optical transceiver modules.

SMT122T: Fibre + Ethernet (Dual optical fibre, PCI Express)

By offering point-to-point fibre-optics supporting data rates up to 4Gbps, our Sundance products are favoured for applications that need high bandwidth, long distance and complete immunity to electrical interference and radio frequency interference (RFI). Targeted applications are high-speed communication systems, high bandwidth remote sensor systems, signal processing, high-speed digital recording, and high bandwidth video systems particularly over long distances. In order to supply you with a turn-key solution, Sundance offers a variety of FPGA IP cores to support high-speed full duplex data transfers over optical transceivers: FC120 Serial FPDP VITA 17.1 IP core, Fibre Channel IP core, or any custom-specific FPGA IP core matching your specifications.

Visit our website at www.SUNDANCE.com to find out more.

SMT123T: Multi-Fibre channels (Four transceivers, PCI Express)

Zoom in on Remote sensor applications Data acquisition in harsh environments

SMT105: Embedded PCIe/104

(Small form factor with Fibre modules)

Aircraft engine manufacturers require to monitor many data acquisition channels in parallel to measure strain, vibration, pressure and the temperature of the engine under test. In order to get the best measure the data acquisition and processing system (typically a EVP6472-916 multichannel and multicore platform) needs to be the smallest size possible, and the close to the engine. As the data is exploited by the laboratory located at more than 300 m. (equivalent to 900 ft.) away from the sensors the main issue is to transport the data without being polluted by the perturbations emitted by engine under test. Optical fibres are particularly well suited to transmit data at gigabit speed rates over long distance ranges, fast enough to guarantee real-time data measurements for analysis. Fibre optics are also excellent against disturbed environments because of their noise immunity, and good resistance to EMCs/RFIs (radio frequency interferences). One well-known customer successfully deployed our EVP6472-916 combined to the SMT551E dual fibres converter board to achieve engine field qualification tests.

SMT700: 3U PXI Express

(Industrial-grade Fibre solution) Series-7: 3U PXI Express | Series-1: PCI/104-Express | Series-C6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Rapid Development Systems | FPGA developer's Kits University Program | Contact us

http://www.sundance.com/enews/[20/10/2011 13:40:48]

Edition: Spring 2011 SMT141 PCI/104-Express

Highlight: New SMT website launch Chat with your Sales Engineers to find what you need faster Having been in business for over 20 years, we have seen, and been a part of, a wide variety of changes in our boardlevel manufacturing industry. As a company we have changed too, and to reflect this we have recently redeveloped our brand and visual identity. As a key element of our rebrand, we have refreshed our website's look and feel, as well as improving the content and user experience. The main website has been improved to include an on-demand chat feature, as well as a re-arrangement for our 500+ combination of products. These are now split into several cost-effective product families recognized by industry form factors:

(Quad 250MSPS ADC digitizer)

SMT720 PXI Express

3U PXI Express, PCI/104-Express, standalone Multicore DSP kits, and FPGA developer's kits and platforms. SUNDANCE is now ready - more than ever - to help you specify innovative and robust system architectures, based on Xilinx Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs (with embedded PowerPC440 processor cores) for your demonstrators as well as the deployment of Commercial, Industrial, Defense and Space-grade solutions.

(LVTTL I/O signals generator)

SMT191 PCI/104-Express

(Dual 1GSPS ADC digitizer)

Visit us at www.SUNDANCE.com to find out more.

SMT739 PXI Express

Meet us at the 2011 ICASSP International conference Sundance will exhibit at the World DSP event - May 22-27, 2011 SUNDANCE is attending and exhibiting with Texas Instruments at the 36th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Prague. (Dual DVI input channels)

SMT859 Standalone discussed.

Free hands-on workshops are being offered to ICASSP attendees. For the ICCASP week, many tutorials, talks, trends and more about signal processing topics will be

We will demonstrate our latest Wireless Development platforms for Multichannel MIMO LTE and WiMAX applications as well as exhibiting our latest Multicore C6472 DSP developer's kit.

For more information, please contact Dr Fabio Ancona: +393491766760

(Quad 40MSPS DAQ channels) Series-7: 3U PXI Express | Series-1: PCI/104-Express | Series-C6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Rapid Developement Systems | FPGA developer's Kits University Program | Contact us

Leading Edge or Bleeding Edge? :: Sundance eNews October 2010

SMT105 PCI/104-Express for military radio-comms

"Leading Edge" or "Bleeding Edge"? Sundance has for the past two decades been riding the "Bleeding Edge Wave" of technology, introducing new products at an alarming rate. Our Modular Platform designs have enabled migration from the "Established and Well Known" technology to the "Advanced and Exciting" technology and provided a compatible hardware upgrade path for you, our customers. Being a "Product-Style Company" we did that without stopping to breathe, think or ask questions such as: ● ● ● ●

"What are the environmental implications of constant changes?" "Would current technology be suitable at a lower price?" "Could we re-design fully working product to make the products more reliable" "Could make current products more versatile and easier to use?"

Download Datasheet So we did and the answers to these questions were a splash of cold water in our face and a kick in the teeth:

SMT100 ●

PCI/104-Express with exceptional interface options

● ● ● ● ●

We are too expensive for General purposes. We do not offer the required Industrial robustness. We do not offer migration paths into Industrial temperature grades. Products are not suitable for life-critical applications. We do not follow any Industry hardware standards. We have no upgrade path for Aerospace and Defence approved components.

Interesting feedback. Thanks. We have been listening and the results are coming to the market during the Autumn of 2010. The first examples of our new range are Industry Standard format PC/104 Cards that sport Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs with integrated PowerPC, together with a range of peripheral features that can be added or developed by you, the Customers. Download Datasheet

The entry-level product, the SMT100, uses the Virtex-5 FX30T and Xilinx offers FREE development tools for this family of FPGA, so extremely cost-effective to get started. The top-of-the range product, the SMT105, is targeted for High-Performance FFTprocessing and Sundance is working with third-parties to provide FPGA IP-Cores and solutions can be developed fast and efficiently. A new common theme for these new products is the clean migration path to Industrial Temperature ranges as the Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs gives access to the defence-graded Virtex-5Q and the space-graded Virtex-5QV, while maintaining the hardware compatibility. These products have been given their own website where you can view possible combinations or just get more information - www.pci104.biz

http://www.sundance.com/enews/ (1 of 2) [07/10/2010 14:47:22]

Sundance eNews :: July 2010

Edition: July 2010

Highlights: MIMO LTE and WiMAX Developer's platform

Strategic alliance with LTE and WiMAX technology experts

Check the 360-spin virtual view!

Sundance has teamed up with Innovative Solutions to support customers in the design and implementation of optimised wireless access systems.

Sundance's MIMO LTE and WiMAX hardware development platforms are based on two 1GHz C6455 fixed-point DSP processors and one large Virtex-5 FPGA device. Together these offer the ultimate balance between performance, flexibility and reconfigurability. They are both ideal software defined and device prototyping platforms for system engineers to get started on their wireless based applications. The 2.4GHz and 5GHz ISM bands MIMO LTE and 2.3-2.7GHz WiMAX RF front-ends are the elementary bricks for all 2n x 2m multichannel inputs and outputs systems. Both platforms feature a dual 12-bit A/D digitizer and dual 12-bit D/A converters to guarantee a good sampling resolution of the two I/Q Rx and Tx signals.

By offering on-demand training and on-site technical courses, telecoms specialists would be able to master the major areas of broadband communication networks: 3GPPLTE, WiMAX, OFDM, OFDMA, MIMO, radio network planning and radio interface design. Furthermore, comprehensive MATLAB software model implementations of LTE (3GPP Release 8 E-UTRA) and WiMAX physical layers are also available for purchase. The LTE PHY Lab and WiMAX PHY Lab licenses can be used at all stages of the software and hardware development from research, prototyping and implementation, up to system benchmarking, verification and testing.

MIMO LTE and WiMAX hardware kits are also respectively compliant with the 3GPP LTE and the WiMAX physical layer models offered by Innovative Solutions. The hardware implementation of such LTE and WIMAX PHY Labs onto Sundance's hardware is also possible. More information: MIMO LTE Development Kit | WiMAX Development Kit

Zoom in on: 3U PXI Express "beamforming" equipment SMT702-based High-speed Multichannel beamformer Sundance is supporting the Wireless Networking Systems Laboratory at Tennessee Technological University, under the responsibility of Dr. Robert C. Qiu, in their developments of UWB sensors and applications in tactical communications and networking. The delivery of a complete 4-channel I/Q receiver system featuring an advanced, flexible and scaleable architecture will enable the laboratory with the necessary infrastructure to boost their research and innovative approach to cognitive radio and real-time smart grid testbeds. The multichannel beamformer is built around five SMT702s (two 3GHz A/D digitizer with large Virtex-5 FPGA module) and an embedded controller from National Instruments fully integrated in an 18-slot wide, 3U compact PXI Express chassis (NI PXIe-1075). Download the application note: SMT702-based beamformer

SMT700: 3U PXI Express | SMT100: PCI/104-Express | EVP6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Educational Offers | Line Card | Contact us Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe by sending an email to enews@sundance.com, with a subject of "unsubscribe eNews". To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. http://www.sundance.com/enews/ (1 of 2) [29/07/2010 12:38:16]

Edition: June 2010

3L Diamond for Multiprocessor systems

Dear Customer,

What will happen then? Questions and Answers

What many will have forgotten – possibly because some of you were still in primary school - is that TI introduced their floating-point TMS320C40 DSP in 1991. Sundance introduced a range of TIM-40s (Texas Instrument Modules for TMS320C40) in 1993. Among them were the SMT303 and SMT304 Video/Graphics Modules. They were scalable, modular and enabled a "Rapid Prototyping" platform and were supported by 3L Diamond.

Sundance will continue to sell, supply and support the current version of the Diamond tool (3.2) which work with all TIMs before the EVP6472. The EVP6472 is not supported by Diamond 3.2. No new update/upgrade contracts will be sold by Sundance and current customers of Diamond 3.x will have support as normal by the Sundance/3L Teams. 3L will directly sell, supply and support the new Diamond tools (4.x) that have been specifically targeted to the TMS320C6472 DSP. This enables 3L to target a common DSP platform that matches the inherited benefit of the Diamond software structure and the same Inter-processor interfaces that can be used to interface to non-Sundance hardware and also work on competitors' (we might soon have one... – smile!) hardware. Reducing the duplication of sales and support efforts (Read = Sundance no longer needs a margin!) has enabled 3L to reduce the overall cost of ownership of the software. Contact 3L@3L.com for more details. Q: I want to stay with Diamond 3.x, but want to use Code Composer Studio 4.x

Sundance sold massive Parallel DSP Processing farms, one particular customer having a system with many hundreds of such TIM Modules. Historically Sundance have sold and provided pre/post sales support for a specific and bespoke version of the 3L Diamond tools, as our DSP + FPGA hardware used propriety technology to make the systems scalable and compatible with older DSPs. Currently we have over 240 active users of the Diamond suite of software. We have since worked closely with 3L Ltd to support the ever-growing range of DSP Modules from Sundance, but the burden of keeping everything compatible has finally broken the camel's back... – We had to change the winning formula before we lost the plot! The arrival of the new TMS320C6472 MultiCore DSP with six internal DSP Cores and standard interfaces to the Real World, such as the super-fast Serial Rapid IO and the de-facto Industry standard Ethernet, enabled Sundance to build an open-standard, embedded platform – The EVP6472 - which offers more performance than ever before, at a lower cost and less power (you have no doubt heard that claim a million times...) - but at a fantastic starting price of USD2,000! – and it's still scalable, but not using any Sundance hardware tricks!

Flemming Christensen

A: Not possible. Not really beneficial either, as CCS4.x does not offer any benefits for TI DSPs prior to the TI MultiCore DSPs. Q: I currently have a maintenance contract with 3L. Will I get a Diamond 4.x? A: No. Diamond 4.x is mainly targeted and developed towards MultiCore DSPs, so does not offer any benefits to previous modules and systems. Q: I would like to continue to use Diamond 3.x and CCS3.x. Will I get

support? A: Yes. If you have a current maintenance contract, but Diamond 3.x will only have bug-fixes. Q: Can I add a Sundance MultiCore Module to my current DSP hardware platform? A: Possible: 1. Buy the Diamond 4.x and the Diamond TCP/IP for Diamond and use Ethernet as interface between old and new DSPs. 2. Purchase a Diamond V4 Premium Licence and create your own custom extension to Diamond supporting your own hardware. 3. Contact 3L and persuade them to make a Diamond 4.x that would work on your specific hardware platform.

Multicore for Software Defined Radio applications EVP6472-943 for baseband signal applications Two 500MHz C6472 Multicore DSPs Virtex-5 FX30T FPGA w. PPC440 Two 14-bit, 250MSPS A/D channels Two 16-bit, 800MSPS D/A channels Standalone and Modular kit Full board support package Evaluation for Diamond 4.0

Order your EVP6472-943 kit today! www.EVP6472.com

SMT700: 3U PXI Express | SMT100: PCI/104-Express | EVP6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Educational Offers | Line Card | Contact us Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe by sending an email to enews@sundance.com, with a subject of "unsubscribe eNews". To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

Sundance eNews :: May 2010

Edition: May 2010

Quad-channel 14-bit, 250MSPS A/D mezzanine card

Market trend 2010-2013

The SMT941 is shipping now!

Small Form Factors' Outlook

The SMT941 is a new FPGA mezzanine card complementing the large range of Sundance Local Bus (SLB) COTS solutions. Data acquisition SLB modules are costeffective and they fit extremely well in Sundance’s concept of flexibility, interoperability, and modular signal processing design. The SMT941 features two low-power consumption Texas Instruments’ ADS62P49 devices offering four-channel 14-bit A/D converters with sampling rates up to 250MSPS.

Even if the first half of 2010 remains challenging, the next big market trend will reach the small form factor (SFF) and embedded computing equipments. A healthy growth of 26% is predicted to happen by 2013. Small form factors - such as 3U cPCI/PXI Express boards, PCI/104Express stackable modules and Multicore-based equipments - bring a rapid response to new highly integrated technologies constrained by weight/space limitation and energy efficiency. Small, rugged designs based on industry standards (PCI express, SATA, USB, Fibre channel, RapidIO…) simply fit where other solutions do not. We have designed our innovative range of COTS products with the small form factor philosophy in mind: making possible module expansion (stack, scale) and customizations through application-specific carrier boards, or FPGA mezzanine cards to give all the flexibility necessary to architect any type of data acquisition, vision and computing systems. Medical, test & measurement, avionics, military and government applications would benefit from Sundance’s small form factor systems to build powerful and reliable portable, stationary, handheld or rack mount equipment. Sundance’s small form factors are the perfect balance between performances, thermal management, size and price.

The ADCs are AC-coupled, and they have a programmable gain up to 6dB to improve SNR/SFDR performance at lower full-scale input ranges, as well as DC offset correction loop. Unique features include to have data sampled by an internal clock source, or by an external clock source supplied. Both sampling clocks may be locked to the on-board 10MHz reference clock, or to an external reference clock input. An external trigger input for customized sampling control is also available. Cascading multiple SLB mezzanine cards for synchronized high-channel count is then possible. The SMT941 is manufactured to support the industrial range of operating temperatures from -40°C to +85°C. Ruggedization using conformal coating is also possible for hostile environmental applications. The SMT941 is targeted at the software defined radio (SDR) baseband infrastructures, real-time multichannel data recorders, embedded LIDAR equipments and 4D medical imaging applications. More information: SMT941 product page

Spotlight: Digitizer systems based on small form factors Multichannel data recorders based on the SMT941 SMT700: 3U PXI Express with Virtex-5 FPGA Rack-mount Instrument, SMT100: PCI/104-Express Stackable Module with Virtex-5 FPGA and PowerPC core, SMT900: Virtex-5 SXT/LXT/FXT Standalone Embedded Platform with USB, EVP6472: TMS320C6472 Multicore DSP and Virtex-5 developer’s kit.

SMT700: 3U PXI Express | SMT100: PCI/104-Express | EVP6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Educational Offers | Line Card | Contact us

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file:///C:/web2/eNews/2010-02.htm

Edition: February 2010 Application's corner

EVP6472: Multicore and Multiprocessor Evaluation Platform Is Multicore a technological dead-end?

Software Defined RADAR

Software defined radar (SDR) platforms can adaptively switch between different modes of operation by modifying both transmit waveforms and receive signal-processing tasks in real time. Key components of such architectures are high-speed A/D and D/A modules along with FPGA devices and fast digital signal processors allow for maximum flexibility in algorithm design. The ElectroScience Laboratory has successfully designed a multicore and hyrid multiprocessor architecture allowing them to explore the performance of multi-channel radar modes such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar and polarimetric radar by analysing parallel coherent transmit and receive channels. The system is based on octal 1GHz C6416T DSP processors, Virtex4 FPGA devices and multi-channel wide-band ADCs and DACs in order to obtain a 500MHz or greater waveform bandwidth with a tunable RF front-end operating from 1 to 18GHz. More information

Multicore systems are defined as singlechip computers containing two or more processing cores each connected to a common shared memory. These devices and multicore-based architectures are announced as the ultimate solution to the performance problems faced by embedded systems. However, design engineers may feel reluctant to jump into this new technology since at this early stage the lack of efficient software programming methodology and tools is still present. In order to evaluated the multicore architecture, we have released the EVP6472 evaluation platform, which features two C6472 Multicore DSPs (each DSP has six C64x+ cores running at 500MHz), 512MB of DDR2 SDRAM, and a Virtex-5 FX30T FPGA with embedded PowerPC 440 core. It is bundled with a 60-day evaluation version of the 3L Diamond Multicore software design tool. Parallel processes and strategies will be then possible by designing simple processing components that communicate efficiently and program them using straightforward, sequential techniques based on communicating programs. The full version of 3L Diamond Multicore will be released from 2Q 2010. Contact your Sundance sales office for more information.

Spotlight: Success story from VTD Characterizing Microwave Power Transistors VTD have successfully launched SWAPX402: an advanced instrument for the time domain load-pull characterization of microwave transistors (see: introduction to measurements for power transistor characterization). SWAP-X402 measures the time domain waveforms of voltages and currents at the transistor terminals under realistic operating conditions. The additional time domain data result in an unprecedented insight in transistor behaviour and are needed for validating large signal models, designing amplifiers, studying reliability... SWAPX402 features a 4-channel sampler-based receiver capable of L band and S band time domain. One of the key component of SWAP-X402 is the Sundance high-speed, multi-channel data acquisition system with Virtex-5 FPGA accelerator guaranty VTD the performance they were looking for. VTD have now decided to commercialise their current and future test and measurement instruments based on the Sundance technology.

SMT700: 3U PXI Express | SMT100: PCI/104-Express | EVP6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Educational Offers | Line Card | Contact us

file:///C:/web2/eNews/2010-02.htm (1 of 2) [27/05/2010 10:12:56]

Happy New Year!

Hot Products of the Year 2010 Customizable Virtex-5 FPGA and PCI Express Technology

Above is my first new product for 2010. It only took a few hours and is mainly made of recycled materials. Hopefully Mr. Snowman will not last as long as the other new products we developed in 2009 and highlighted in this communication, but it was fun to make with my Kids. Sundance, during this our 20th Anniversary year, will invest in product development that offer lower-power consumption, more performance and a well-defined upgrade path. The introduction in November 2009 of the SMT372T, with its 12x 700MHz DSP Cores, is a testament to Sundance's commitment to this strategy. We introduced the first DSP Module in 1993 that had a single 40MHz DSP and have since then introduced a new Module every year and we will continue on the same path for many years. The EVP6472 Development Platform, with an introduction price of only USD2000.00, thanks to generous support from Texas Instrument, is going to enable prototyping of a broad range of application. Programming multiple DSP Cores is not as easy as building a snowman, but luckily we have excellent software support from 3L Diamond. Another significant milestone has been the introduction of the SMT7 Series of PXI Express Cards and SMT1 Series of PCI104 Express Cards. Both are supported by the growing-range of Sundance Local Bus peripherals daughterboards developed primarily for OEM customers. The highlight was shipping of the SMT903 WiMax RF-Front-end and the SMT901 LTE FR-Front end. These products represent many man-years of effort and are now available with VHLD IPCores and schematics to allow integration into YOUR platform.

Two major product families have been released in Year 2009: Series-7 (SMT700) and Series-1 (SMT100), respectively 3U PXI Express and PCI/104-Express form factors. Both hardware solutions feature a range of Virtex-5 LXT, SXT and FXT FPGA devices which implement a PCI Express interface (x4 lanes at 2.5Gbps), which is essential for high-bandwidth applications. The SMT700 is a rugged and scalable solution that can be mounted into a strong 3U PXI chassis/ enclosure. The Series-1 is dedicated for embedded applications in which several SMT100s can be stacked together and be used in standalone mode or in combination with a single board computer.

Spotlight High-speed Serial ATA I/II Host Controller IP Core The SATA Host Controller I/O IP core is used frequently in applications that require an FPGA and also access to SATA storage devices. It incorporates the Transport layer, the Link layer and the PHY layer on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. It is fully compliant with Serial ATA II specification at 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps (sustained 220MB/s for read and 200MB/s for write operations). The core can also be implemented with multiple instantiations for RAID-type applications. VHDL source code and DO-254 certified documentation are available.

XDS510 USB JTAG Emulation XDS510.com supplies USB XDS510 JTAG emulators, with or without Code Composer from TI. Over 20 TI DSP generations are supported and there are currently 3 versions available online. The emulators are USB buspowered and support TI's device roadmap from 1.8v-5v. More development is planned so watch this space.

Flemming Christensen flemming.c@sundance.com

The XDS510 is available from only $299

P.S. The 'White-Spot' on the top of my hair is long-lasting, non-melting snow, I can reassure you!

SMT700: 3U PXI Express | SMT100: PCI/104-Express | EVP6472: C6472 Multicore DSP Educational Offers | Line Card

Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe. To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

eNews TI's TMS320C6472 multicore DSP. Available at a Sundance store near you.

November 2009 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

If you do just one thing today, read this special copy of Sundance eNews and then visit www. EVP6472.com and order the industry's first off-the-shelf multiprocessor, multicore solution that features dual TI C6472 Digital Signal Processors.

EVP6472 Open 24/7 JTAG Emulation 20 Years of Sundance Product Range University Program Press Releases Previous eNews

The Sundance EVP6472 is our new development platform that supports TI's launch of the industry's most power efficient, six-core DSP, the TMS320C6472. As one of a select number of number of companies within the C6472 Developer Network we've closely coupled dual C6472s with Xilinx FPGAs and made the whole solution available on a low cost, flexible and modular platform. Exclusively available from Sundance, the EVP6472 is provided with a TIM carrier card and a modular plug-in that features dual C6472 multicore DSP, a Virtex-5 FX30 FPGA with embedded PowerPC, 2 banks of DDR2 memory, Rocket Serial Link (RSL) connectors and a host USB 2.0 interface. With the C6472, TI has broken the power performance barrier by fully optimizing the device for applications where performance per watt is a critical requirement. The C6472 DSP offers the lowest power consumption with the highest processing performance of any 3GHz multicore DSP in the market, performing at 3.7W performance and 0.15 mW/MIPS. Another industry first for the Sundance EVP6472 is design support from 3L's Diamond tool-suite. Diamond enables easy access to the on-board 12 C64x+™ cores and allows the designer to rapidly build, model, test and iterate different design architectures by moving tasks between the processor cores. The EVP6472 is ideally suited to the development of high-performance applications such as highend industrial, mission critical, test and measurement, communication, medical imaging, blade server and high-end image and video processing. Our support and 'insider view' of the C6472 is another landmark for Sundance and reflects the strength of the relationship we have developed with TI over many years. And to kick start the development process, the EVP6472 is available for order with shipping in December 2009. For a time limited period only, pricing starts at $2000.00 USD and for more information please visit www.EVP6472.com, email EVP6472@sundance.com or contact for your local Sundance Office. Digital Signal Processing has changed!

Hundreds of Millions of Gates and Billions of MIPS For those of you who know me, you may be astonished to learn that November 2009 records the 20th anniversary of Sundance as a designer, manufacturer and supplier of multiprocessor systems. How, you are asking yourself, did Flemming set up Sundance when he was only 12?!!!! My youthful good looks and charm aside David Milsom and I founded Sundance in 1989 when we had the idea of closely coupling DSPs with a 'new' technology called the FPGA. We thought there was a synergy between the two types of device and if we could bring them together on a common platform that was modular, flexible and cost effective - people would buy. Sitting in my Office 20 years on I'm glad to say that the idea was a good one and that customers have placed their faith in us, and the idea and our products, with their hard earned dollars and cents. Thousands of Sundance multiprocessor systems have been shipped to customers across the world delivering hundreds of millions of gates and billions of MIPS processing performance. From our start-up beginnings we have introduced hundreds of products and innovations that have made their way into the mainstream of electronics product design. Our products today feature the latest and highest density FPGAs from Xilinx and our close working relationship with TI goes from strength to strength, evidenced by our selection as a launch partner for TIs new C6472 multicore DSP. And throughout the Sundance journey we've also placed emphasis on ease-of-use and ease-of-design. Our modular design philosophy and commitment to forward and backwards compatibility remain at the cornerstone of our product development strategy. We are a member of The Mathworks Connections program and have worked hard to garner support from the EDA industry so that there is a rich comprehensive structure of design tools, IP and software supporting our hardware, and our customers. By consistently pushing the technology envelope, we believe that we helped ignite innovation in the multiprocessor design environment and have helped drive multiprocessing into the mainstream for very high performance applications. I would personally like to thank all our customers, partners, stakeholders and staff who have helped to grow and shape Sundance. Without your faith and support we could not have achieved what we have. Open 4 Business 24/7 Just in case you hadn't noticed, over the summer months we've been working hard to refresh and renew our window to the world. WWW.SUNDANCE.COM, the home of Multiprocessing, has been reborn! I hope you like the new style format and content. We've tried to make access to product information easier and faster. Our Embedded range of products are quick and easy to find, our Modular products can be searched by device type, family and manufacturer and there is fast access to end-market focused solutions such as Test and Measurement, Defense and Aerospace, Wireless and Satellite Comms. We've also expanded our online store, so your next Sundance product is only a few clicks away. If you've any comments or feedback on the site please email these to the webmaster.

USB JTAG Emulation - On YouTube Some people describe JTAG emulators as the umbilical cord between tools and hardware and a critical 'must have' during development. Well that's what our customer tell us. So in response we have created a specialist Sundance division exclusively focused on JTAG emulation. XDS510.com supplies USB XDS510 JTAG emulators, with or without Code Composer from TI. Over 20 TI DSP generations are supported and there are currently 3 versions available online. The emulators are USB buspowered and support TI's device roadmap from 1.8v-5v. More development is planned so watch this space. Our JTAG emulators can be ordered online so please visit www.xds510.com to get yours. A USB XDS510 is available from only $299 We also have a store for USB XDS560 JTAG emulators, with or without Code Composer from TI. Again, these support over 20 TI DSP generations. There are currently 2 versions available online. The emulators are USB bus-powered and support TI's device roadmap from 1.8v-5v. More development is planned so watch this space. Our JTAG emulators can be ordered online so please visit www.xds560.com to get yours. A USB XDS560 is available from only $1500

eNews June 2009 ● ● ●

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3L Sundance Product Range Sundance University Program SDR Kit SMT703 WiMax LTE Press Releases Previous eNews

4G 4You In the April issue of eNews we highlighted our latest 4G multiprocessing solution for LTE (Long Term Evolution) and our position one of the leading providers of development systems and production modules for 3G and now 4G technology (don't forget that we are also a pioneer of MIMO development). To reinforce this message and to deliver more of our 4G roadmap, at the recent WiMAX Global Forum Congress we launched our new SMT703 WiMAX development system. This new WiMAX offer brings the processing power and re-programmability of very high density FPGAs and the modular flexibility of Sundance hardware to bear on next generation Fixed or Mobile wireless. Its performance, specification and capabilities are impressive! For maximum flexibility and performance, the SMT703 is built around a user programmable FPGA architecture that features the latest Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs in the SXT, FXT or LXT variants. It is supported with two WiMAX RF transceivers that in turn are supported with a mixed signal front-end. The Maxim WiMAX transceivers are IEEE802.16-2004 compliant and support OFDM up to 64-QAM. They operate at 2.3 - 2.7 GHz and integrate a power amplifier driver, receive/transmit mixer, low-noise amplifier, receive/transmit filters, synthesizer, VCO, receive gain control, and transmit power control. Each RF transceiver is coupled with the mixed-signal front end chip from Analog Devices that integrates two 12-bit ADCs (80MSPS) as well as two 12-bit DACs (200MSPS using interpolation), to provide analog and digital conversions. For applications where increased processing logic is required or where the processing chain needs to be extended the SMT703 is supplied with High-Speed Bus and RocketIO Serial Link connectors to attach additional multiprocessing modules, or to interface to external signal generators or analyzers. And if you need to accelerate your WiMAX design to market, tool support for our multiprocessor solutions lead the field. Our design ecosystem boasts an array of design solutions including Code Composer Studio from TI, 3L's Diamond, CoDeveloper from Impulse, RTW-EC and HDLCoder from The MathWorks™ and comprehensive VHDL and Verilog support from EDA vendors. For more information on WiMAX, MIMO, LTE and the complete range of 4G Sundance solutions please get in touch with your nearest Sundance Office or visit www.sundance.com.

Introducing... Multiprocessor Interface Synthesis! Creating tools that help the designer improve productivity is like walking a tight rope… it is a fine balancing act. On the one hand increasing design automation whilst on the other retaining designer control over critical elements of the design. In the 3.2 release of the Diamond Multiprocessor Tool-Suite, we think our friends at 3L have got this balance just about right, and it's a big deal for Sundance customers. The 3.2 release sets a new benchmark in multiprocessor design. We've road-tested it on number of our modules and we like the new features, performance, capabilities and time saving efficiencies it delivers. Diamond 3.2 automatically creates communications paths between processors on your Sundance hardware, it automatically generates simulation projects for HDL simulation and auto creates debug scripts for Code Composer Studio. With Diamond 3.2, connections between attached processors on a Sundance platform can be handled automatically. Using the familiar Diamond IDE the designer places tasks, or self-contained blocks of code, onto the system processors and connects them with channels that do not require physical information. Diamond then manufactures the firmware needed for the interconnect, optimizes the design and creates the physical implementation. Integration with the TI design flow is better. For designers targeting TI's C6000 series, Diamond 3.2 automatically creates Code Composer Studio GEL scripts to allow easy debugging of multiple DSPs. You get 3L's latest TI DM642 Video Library that has faster code execution, improved internal memory utilization and more end-user design examples. If you're using TI C6455 DSP, the guys at 3L have bundled in a new and improved EDMA3 and sRIO drivers that deliver better communications performance. And if that wasn't enough, to make the verification of your FPGA design that little bit easier, Diamond 3.2 is ISE10.1 ready and its HDL simulation capabilities have been improved with the automatic creation of simulation projects. But don't just take our word for it, contact your local Sundance representative and get your hands on Diamond 3.2, you won't be disappointed. Sundance Bits and Bytes IP Program Rolls-Out Through the 2H08 and the 1H09 we announced to the market delivery elements of our IP roadmap via partnerships with specialist IP provider targeting DSP-FPGA multiprocessor systems. ●

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IP Specialist LogicDesign Solutions helped us to offer single-chip serial ATA II solutions for our 7Series of Multiprocessor Modules. Working with Cadre Codesign our customers now have access to JPEG cores that are optimized for our DSP FPGA Multiprocessing Modules Our partnership with Dillon Engineering has made available benchmark FFT IP that outperforms any other industry solution 3L and DFCDesign combined their efforts to deliver the industry's first TCP/IP Stack that is totally optimized for multiprocessing systems As we enter 2H09 we are pleased to let you know that our IP roll-out, rolls on, with a raft of new cores and libraries to be announced. Keep a watching brief over the summer for news about a series of new, ultra-dense IP cores.

A Kick Start for MIMO and WiMAX Inside our SMT6040 Simulink® Multi-DSP Multi-FPGA co-design and co-generation Toolbox we've added design examples for WiMAX and MIMO applications. The tool box and design examples complement our WiMAX and MIMO modular hardware solutions and help made model-based design just that little bit easier.

Coming Soon to a multiprocessor platform near you… Interested in gigabit wireless networking? Developing next generation wireless products? Need 60GHz wireless? Watch this space!

eNews April 2009 ● ● ● ● ●

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3L SMT362 Code Composer Stuido Sundance Product Range Sundance University Program SDR Kit WiMax LTE Press Releases Previous eNews

Stack Attack It's been a long time coming, but after the noise and fanfare of Software Stacks and Silicon Stacks, the result was worth waiting for. What am I talking about you ask? Well the teams at 3L and DFCDesign have produced a Multiprocessing TCP/IP Stack that is totally optimized for multiprocessing systems. This 'Stack Attack' now provides the Sundance designer with multiprocessing TCP/IP that delivers gigabit Ethernet data rates, is integrated into the 3L Diamond Multiprocessor tool-suite, is RFC compliant and certified as Diamond Enabled. Roadtested on the SMT362 Digital Video Infrastructure Processor TIM that has 2 x 1GHz C6455 DSPs, 256Mb DDR2-500 SDRAM and a Virtex-4 FX60, the multiprocessing stack supports the low level TCP, UDP, IP, IGMP, ICMP and ARP stack protocols and delivers the gigabit data rates that are becoming commonplace in processor intensive applications such as high-end video and imaging, wireless base stations and networking. To drive network connectivity, the stack's on-chip EMAC (Ethernet Media Access Control) provides the Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet interface. The protocol overhead is light touch at 10% and stack configuration and deployment is seamless through its integration into the Diamond IDE and tight interoperability with TI's Code Composer Studio. And because you can use the stack from inside Diamond, it can be called by the designer from within the Diamond IDE and make use of a standard BSD socket API to simplify the process of porting applications. According to Sobeslav Valach DFCDesign's CEO. "because of the work completed by ourselves and 3L, integration effort is taken away from the designer and the result is a very high performance stack that is easy to use and deploy." So go on, be generous and give the Stack the multiprocessing home it deserves. If you need help check out our product range and you may just be surprised!

'Under The Spotlight - SUPer deals from Sundance' With our latest Sundance University Program (SUP) special offer we have tried our hardest to put the SUP into SUPer value, SUPer features, SUPer performance and even SUPer SUPport! In this issue of eNews we are putting the spotlight on our new SDR Kit that delivers an off-the-shelf hardware development platform and software tool kit for complete SDR development. SUPer Value Our special academic pricing is available to instructors, students and researchers of recognized institutions and for academic purposes only. We are offering a massive 70% discount off our standard list price and the offer also includes the 3L Diamond multiprocessor tool-suite and the kind hearted guys at TI will also provide you with a copy of Code Composer Studio (CCS) free of charge. SUPer Features Based on our SMT8146 development platform for radio and waveform applications, the SDR Kit kit is modular, flexible, scalable, upgradable and…affordable. It offers university customers the following features: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

USB, JTAG & Ethernet-ready Platform Dual TI 300MHz Floating-Point DSPs (On demand: Dual 1GHz Fixed-Point DSPs) Xilinx Virtex-4 SX35 & FX60 FPGA Two 125MHz, 14-bit A/D channels Two 500MHz, 16-bit D/A channels Onboard SDRAM and Flash resources Code Composer Studio included for FREE 3L Diamond multiprocessor tool-suite with software demo SMT6048 USB driver and software API

SUPer Performance ● ● ●

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The two 14-bit ADCs channels each deliver 125 MSPS The dual-channel 16-bit DAC converts digital results into analog signals at a rate up to 500 MSPS For pre and post-processing the Xilinx Virtex-4 SX (XC4VSX35) features up to 512, XtremeDSP slices and is capable of running at 500 MHz and the Virtex-4 FX60 has 500 MHz integrated block memory Supplied with 3L Diamond and Code Composer Studio, and compatible with Simulink, designer performance is enhanced by the most productive design tools in the market

SUPer SUPport ● ● ● ●

Customer are provided withan online technical support system @ http://support.sundance.com Support for TI's Code Composer Studio is provided through their European Customer Support Center Go to http://forum.3l.com/ to access the 3L support forum and knowledge base User Guides, Documentation, Tutorials, demo applications, source and design examples.

If you want to get your hands on the SDR Kit or know more about the Sundance University Program (SUP) please visit our website or contact your local Sundance Office direct.

'Long Term Evolution (LTE)... It maybe sooner than you think' At the Mobile World Congress we were delighted to have worked with the Comsys Mobile team to help deliver and verify their breakthrough LTE Transmitter. At the show Comsys Mobile demonstrated full HD video streaming over LTE, but what you may be asking is LTE? Why is it being promoted as the next big thing in our communications infrastructure? And what's it got to do with Sundance? (well some people do!) LTE, (Long Term Evolution), is a 4G technology described by many as the next major step in wireless communications technology. It's an all digital solution that will deliver (it is claimed) the higher bandwidth, higher reliability and better quality of service networks we will need. So what's driving this requirement (it involves big time infrastructure investment)? As the very proud and happy owner of an iPhone (3G), the answer is in the palm of my hand. It is not so much the demands of corporate business that are driving 4G, though they play a critical part, 4G is being driven by the mobile TV, bebo generation and is a consumer revolution. Everybody these days seems to be twittering, most of the population half my age are uploading video clips onto YouTube, VodPod or their preferred social networking site... and if you get lost, you can find yourself with GPS or a location service. These are the new, multimedia rich services that are driving our insatiable appetite for high reliability bandwidth and are squaring the circle on LTE. Based on IP (the Internet Protocol) LTE is much better suited to data than current technologies that grew up in the voice centric era. LTE will deliver 100 Mbps downlink rates and 50 Mbps for uplink and antenna technologies such as MIMO will enable the better processing of data and better utilization of network capacity. So hyperbole about the future of LTE aside (and I don't believe it is), what has this technology to do with Sundance and why haven't I mentioned WiMax - the other 4G technology? For the past few years Sundance has progressively become one of the leading providers of development systems and production modules for 3G and now 4G technology. Amongst our many customers, Comsys Mobile used our modular solutions, the SMT148 carrier, SMT351T Virtex 5 FPGA module and the SMT350 Dual ADC/ DAC module to help develop their LTE transmitter. mimoON the LTE pioneer for software defined radio (SDR) use our MIMO development systems in their development programme and WiMax, yes, we have that covered too, with our WiMax Development Kit that supports the design and development of a wide range of WiMAX applications from base station prototyping through Wireless cellular prototypes. Who'll win out in the 4G race remains to be seen. Verizon are backing LTE as are AT&T in their many public announcements. WiMax certainly has its supporters and is more mature than LTE. Predicting the future is an inexact science, but either way Sundance has the spectrum of 4G covered.

eNews The Many Habits of Highly Effective Multiprocessor Design'

March 2009 ● ● ● ● ●

3L SMT712 Mobile World Congress Press Releases Previous eNews

At the beginning of January a news item flashed across my desk from Sandia Labs…‘more chip cores can mean slower supercomputing’. As a veteran advocate of the multiprocessing model you can imagine this caught my attention. What had the guys at Sandia discovered? What was this new revelation? The answer was a rather well worn, well versed and long standing issue (though I applaud the Sandia team for highlighting it again). So I contacted Peter Robinson at 3L, a multiprocessing design authority and we ‘shared our memories’ on the subject. This meeting of minds, memories (coupled with a certain sense of déjà vu) resulted in the following '7 Habits of Highly Effective Multiprocessor Design’; some golden rules that will help you deliver faster computing and supercomputing performance. At the heart of the Sandia analysis was that shared memory doesn’t really work. As they put it, “the problem is the lack of memory bandwidth as well as contention between processors over the memory bus available to each processor.” “The difficulty is contention among modules,” said James Peery, director of Sandia’s Computations, Computers, Information and Mathematics Center. “The cores are all asking for memory through the same pipe. It’s like having one, two, four, or eight people all talking to you at the same time, saying, ‘I want this information.’ Then they have to wait until the answer to their request comes back. This causes delays.”

The Multicore Dilemma: (Photo by Randy Montoya)

And James is absolutely right, the shared memory concept for multi-core is flawed. This approach to general purpose multi-core processing is like building Hadrian’s Wall with 100 builders spread between Newcastle and Carlisle with one guy with a wheelbarrow delivering the bricks… and the problems become worse as the number of processor cores on one chip increases. So how can you overcome this problem? What are the 7 Habits you need to employ? I’ve listed them below, but if you want more information or want to discuss this further, please email me at flemming.c@sundance.com or contact Peter Robinson at psr@3L.com, you’ll find us a receptive audience. The Many Habits of Highly Effective Multiprocessor Design 1. Get rid of shared resources 2. Use simple processors (with independent memories) that can be programmed efficiently using higher level languages 3. Make them go as fast as possible, using the simplicity to drive the speed increases (and leave room for more on-chip memory) 4. Don't waste silicon with a vast array of specialized peripherals 5. Limit peripherals to a uniform set of very fast serial links: fast = simple to use and with none of the undesirable "features" that destroy things like RapidIO 6. Combine these with independent memories. 7. At the periphery, where the system interacts with the rest of the universe, add specialized convertors from links to whatever device standards you need. ..and just in case. If someone tells you that software can solve the problem, please remember the wise words of Tensilica’s CEO, Chris Rowen, “The challenge of writing software for programming general purpose computing applications is generally recognized in the scientific computing community as the biggest single unsolved, and perhaps unsolvable, computing problem.”

'There's a new kid on the block… and his friends name is Butch.' You knew it was only a matter of time before we brought to you, our most obvious cliché, but with the arrival of our new kid on-the-block, we thought the time was right. The kid in question is the 'Sundance Kid' and better known as the SMT712, a tough talkin, hard workin Dual DAC PXI Express Hybrid Peripheral Module. And just like the Sundance Kid who was immortalized by Robert Redford, the SMT712 takes no prisoners. The SMT712 is a dividend of the PXI product development roadmap we announced in October 2008 and demonstrates our commitment to customers who have taken the PXI specification to the heart of their product and service development. It integrates two fast 12-bit DACs, 2 banks of 64 bit wide 300MHz DDR2 memory and 8 lanes of 2.5Gbits/s PXI Express. At the heart of the SMT712 is a Xilinx Virtex 5 LX110T device, optimized for high performance logic and advanced serial connectivity. The device features 640 User I/O, 64 DSP48E slices and can access both 1GB DDR2 memory banks to store data on the fly. The SMT712s Dual DACs are optimized for wideband communications and radar applications and feature an update rate up to 2.3Gsps. They have four 12-bit multiplexed low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) input ports that operate up to 575MHz and have outstanding spurious and noise performance. As standard, the SMT712 is a 3U PXI Express peripheral module. It's supplied with two PXI Express connectors, XP4 and XP3, and it dedicates 8 lanes to the PXI Express bus giving an effective bandwidth per direction of 16Gb/s. The SMT712 can also plug in any PXI Express Peripheral Slot or any PXI Express Hybrid Slot, or it can be a 3U Hybrid Peripheral Slot Compatible PXI-1 Module through the supply of an XP4 connector a P1 connector. In summary, it's the PXI Express solution you can have your way! For more information please contact your local Sundance Office or email enquiries@sundance.com

'Sundance @ the Mobile World Congress' If you didn't get to the Mobile World Congress (MWC09) in Barcelona, you might not be aware that Sundance, our partners and customers were right at the heart of the show, mixing it with the likes of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Vodafone's Vittoria Colao…and Kevin Spacey, yes Kevin Spacey! Promoting their position as the pioneer's of LTE (Long Term Evolution) on software defined radio platforms, were our customer and friend mimoOn. They were demonstrating, amongst other things, LTE software integration onto high-end TI DSP, and end-to-end LTE video streaming calls between a complete LTE eNodeB protocol stack and a complete LTE terminal protocol stack implementation. mimoOn use our MIMO development systems that feature the SMT901 Dual MIMO RF transceiver module. It comprises two complete, fully configurable transceiver chains between two 2 x 10-bit digital I/Q interfaces and two dual-band 50 Ohm antenna ports. Created to help companies such as mimoOn push the boundaries of communications design, our MIMO solutions provide the fastest, lowest risk route to prototyping and testing next generation MIMO applications and algorithms. They are scalable to add more channels and more DSP and FPGA processing power and are fully supported by 3L's Diamond multiprocessor tool-suite. To learn more about mimoOn please visit www.mimoon.de and to find out how Sundance solutions are catalyzing next generation communications please visit www.sundance.com.

eNews January 2009 ● ● ● ●

Dillon Engineering 3L Press Releases Previous eNews

'Multiprocessing, Magnetism and The Milky Way ' At Sundance we've always set our sights high in delivering the most cost effective and high performance multiprocessing solutions, and this philosophy was tested to the limit when scientists at the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) asked us to help them on their journey to the Milky Way! The NRC team at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton had been tasked with investigating the magnetic field (in the interstellar medium) of our Galaxy, and in particular to measure the direction and field strength of the magnetic field of the Milky Way. They soon worked out that standard processing technologies just wouldn't deliver the power and performance they needed and a custom developed system was too expensive in terms of hard cash and time. The solution the team at NRC eventually decided upon was to combine our off-the-shelf modular multiprocessing technologies with the Diamond multiprocessing design tool from 3L. It was this combination of technologies coupled with their own design efforts that enabled them to create a broad-band spectroscopic data acquisition system that was on budget, on specification and delivered years ahead of schedule. Already deployed via their 26-m radiotelescope, the developed high sensitivity system has an instantaneous bandwidth of 500 MHz and a spectral resolution of 2048 channels. The phase relation of the two input signals is measured in real-time and using 3L Diamond, the instrument design was completed in only 18 months, "The detailed study of magnetism in the Milky Way is made possible by new developments and technologies in radio astronomy that includes new wideband antennas, wide-band digital receivers and new data analysis tools," said Maik Wolleben, Covington Fellow at the Canadian National Research Council. "By coupling the 3L Diamond toolsuite with modular hardware from Sundance we quickly developed a cost effective, very high performance multiprocessing solution and are using it years ahead of expectations." Maik and his team are now transferring the multiprocessing approach to other teams around the world and we wish them every success! If you want to read more about this amazing journey, please go to www.3L.com, the home of multiprocessing design.

'More IP Partnerships for Sundance Customers' In the last quarter of 2008 you'll remember that we announced new additions to our IP library that increased the availability and choice of pre-optimized logic cores for Sundance customers. (and just in case you can't remember, our IP newcomers include standard compliant JPEG IP from our partner Cadre Codesign and the industry's fastest FFT from Dillon Engineering). At the same time we promised to increase the availability of IP in 2009 and true to our word, this month sees the availability of verified SATA II IP cores from our IP partner, LogicDesign Solutions. Compliant with the Serial ATA II specification this new IP offering supports signalling rates of 1.5Gbps SATA-Gen1 and scales to 3Gbps SATA-Gen2. The LogicDesign Host and Dual Host Controller cores implement shadow registers and SATA SuperSet registers, supports 8b/10b encoding and decoding and has state machine controlled power management (shared between PHY and Link layer). They feature a 32-bit wide interface between the link layer and transport layer and a 128-word ingress/ egress FIFO between the transport and link layer. And what's best of all, the above specification is available as a single chip Virtex 5 solution. LogicDesign provides VHDL source code, test benches and validation data, and DO-254 documentation can also be provided. The IP is immediately available on our 7-Series hardware and offers designers a multiprocessing development environment that features PCI-X, PCI-E, GigE, SATA and fibre optic modules for interconnect. Oh, and one last thing. In the form of a shrink wrapped SATA II compliant 3L Diamond multiprocessing task, LogicDesign is the first IP provider to offer SATA IP that is expressly designed for multiprocessing systems. Its 3L Diamond task is a self-contained block of code that incorporates the Transport layer, the Link layer and the PHY layer on a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA. This unique offer enables quick and straightforward integration of LogicDesign's SATA IP into the multiprocessor system design. To get more information on how our IP can support your design, please contact your local Sundance Office or email enquiries@sundance.com 'Voice your opinion on Multiprocessor Design?' As a regular reader of eNews, you'll have seen us bang-on about the 3L Diamond multiprocessor tool-suite and how it simplifies the development of multiprocessor systems to improve productivity and reduce risk and time-to-market. If you want to make a comment on multiprocessor design now's your chance. 3L are running an Online Survey to capture your views and opinions, so please go to http://www.3l.com/contactus/online-survey and have your say.

'Ethernet support for the SMT148-FX standalone carrier board' It is possible to reach long distances and achieve gigabit data transfers with the Sundance optical transceiver modules, but have you ever needed to control your realtime system remotely? If the answer to this is yes, then the SMT6058 Ethernet Board Support Package (Ethernet BSP) is the solution to interface the SMT148-FX standalone carrier board to the most popular LAN technology. The SMT6058 offers a data communication link between computer and embedded hardware systems over the Ethernet by the mean of a Low-weight Internet Protocol (LwIP) TCP/IP stack. The library of software functions provides all the necessary TCP/ IP API (Application Programming Interface) to exchange information from the SMT148FX embedded system to a workstation. The workstation then stores the data on disk and performs offline post processing. The SMT6058 is the ideal Ethernet TCP/IP solution: ●

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to develop secured data transmissions with AES encryption for Aerospace & Defense embedded applications on the Radio Giga development platform, to test the next generation of high-quality Video over IP communication networks for Digital Video Broadcast standards with the DVIP prototyping solution, or to architect networks of high-performance embedded computing (HPEC) systems with the scalable RASS FPGA clusters.

The board support package includes a complete web server application running on the PowerPC™ 405 to demonstrate the SMT6058 TCP/IP API and functionalities. Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe. To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

eNews December 2008 ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

SMT702 PARS IET Innovation Awards DVIP Dillon Engineering 3L Impulse SMT8121 SMT351T RASS Radio GIGA MiMo Sundance eStore Press Releases Previous eNews

'Wrapping up for Christmas' Depending on where you are in the world, it's likely that you'll be wrapping festive gifts, wrapping up end of year business or putting the shrink-wrap on your final 2008 orders. This Christmas Cracker, special edition eNews is our 'wrap' for 2008 and inside we've highlighted some of the key events, activities and product introductions that have made 2008 a cracking year for Sundance. As a part of this we particularly want to express our thanks, gratitude and goodwill to all our customer, partners, suppliers and friends. Without you, our achievements in 2008 would not have been possible.

'IP' As we continue to increase the number of application optimized multiprocessor modules, we've partnered with IP providers to support their roll-out to customers and application groups. Just recently we strengthened our partnership Cadre Codesign to offer their CT-JPEG04 core that is based on the JPEG ISO/IEC IS 110918-1 standard. Initially available on our Digital Video Imaging Platform (DVIP), the core compresses images of 1280 x 1024 pixels resolution at a rate of 500 frames/sec and can sustain an input of one 8 bit pixel every 660MHz. The deal with Cadre comes on the back of our agreement with Dillon Engineering to offer their benchmark FFT IP on our SMT702 module. Area efficient, Dillon's FFT cores occupy fewer FPGA logic resources in terms of XtremeDSP slices and BRAMs than comparable off-the-shelf FFT cores. It sustains a rate up to 250Msps to deliver a 36 percent faster performance versus comparable cores. And by offering an FFT length up to 64M points, Dillon's core sets the industry benchmark.

'Design Tools' 2008 saw key developments in our commitment to improving the design flow and ecosystem that make our multiprocessor systems the most accessible, productive and easy-to-use. We have continued to develop our alliance with 3L, the multiprocessor design company, with our hardware modules being the most supported platform by 3L's Diamond. Expressly created for multiprocessor systems 3L Diamond it is a toolsuite and model that provides a highly automated development flow from concept through to applications running in our multiprocessor hardware. Unlike traditional design tools that are resource hungry and designed for single processors only, 3L Diamond simplifies the development of multiprocessor systems to improve productivity, and reduce risk and time-to-market. We also spear-headed the development of a breakthrough design flow that features 3L Diamond and the CoDeveloper tools from Impulse. The Impulse CoDeveloper tools allow C-language applications to be quickly and efficiently retargeted to FPGA-based platforms and offer the lowest barrier-to-entry design solution for system partitioning and creating hardware modules and processor peripherals from software code. With this addition, our design ecosystem boasts a formidable array of joined-up design solutions including Code Composer Studio from TI, RTW-EC and HDLCoder from The MathWorks™, the PARS design tool and comprehensive VHDL and Verilog support from EDA vendors. And of course PARS was recently recognized for its outstanding contribution to multiprocessor design by winning the prestigious Software Design category at the IET's 2008 Innovation Awards. Not bad!

'Products' Throughout the past 12 months we've cranked the Sundance 'engine' that is our product development team to deliver more than a dozen new multiprocessor product introductions. When you are next sitting in a plane and able to use your own mobile phone to make and receive calls, it's quite possible that it is our SMT8121 that is enabling the connection from an on-board base station. If you need the highest performing Xilinx FPGA technology, check out our SMT351T which features the Virtex-5 SX95T that includes 640 Xilinx XtremeDSP slices capable of delivering up to 352 GMACs of DSP performance. For those of you with a thirst for supercomputing performance, our summer debutant, the RASS, is a modular and interchangeable array of high performance FPGAs and GPUs that deliver high performance, low latency and flexibility across single precision and double precision applications. With our 7 series modules we extended our offer to the rugged, CompactPCI-based market with PXIe support and autumn 2008 saw the introduction of Radio Giga … our signal processing Nirvana. Received to wide acclaim, Radio Giga has gone beyond 3G and features Virtex 5 Xilinx FPGAs, C Series TI DSP and 6 Channels of GHz ADC from e2v.

This year also saw the building-out of our OEM component business to include a much broader range of function specific sub-modules and daughter cards. Cards and modules available under the OEM solutions banner range from Dual MIMO RF through Dual WiMax RF; Camera Link, Dual Gigabit Ethernet and DAQ modules from 125MHz through 1GHz. 'and finally...' If time is running out and you still need to get a hold of a last minute gift, check out http://store. sundance.com/ and you just might find what you're looking for.

eNews November 2008

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SMT702 PARS IET Innovation Awards Press Releases Previous eNews

'Tokyo Drift?' Tokyo Drift was a member of 'The Fast and The Furious' film franchise, that involved fast cars furiously racing round a street circuit (of Tokyo no less) with the high stakes being, death, honor or glory. Whilst we liked the film we just thought it wasn't fast and furious enough. Not having access to an array of high powered cars (we are working on that) or the streets of downtown Tokyo, we came up with our own 'circuit' solution the SMT702 that features 8 lanes of PXI express. On to this we placed FFT from Dillon Engineering to deliver a package that is seriously fast and furious. By offering a FFT length up to 64M points, Dillon's core is quite simply streets ahead of the competition. Its IEEE-754 Floatingpoint FFT core sustains a rate up to 250Msps to deliver a 36 percent faster performance versus comparable cores. Area efficient, Dillon's FFT cores occupy fewer FPGA logic resources in terms of XtremeDSP slices and BRAMs than comparable off-theshelf FFT cores. Our circuit, the SMT702, is fitted with the fastest Xilinx Virtex-5 LX110T-3 FPGA that is optimized for high-performance logic with low-power serial connectivity. The FPGA is supported by 2 banks of 64-bit 512Mb DDR2 SDRAM and dual 3GHz ADC that can be combined to deliver 6 Gsps. 8-lanes of PXI Express deliver 16Gb/s of effective bandwidth per direction…and the module can plug in to any PXI Express peripheral slot or any PXI Express hybrid slot. And as a navigation aid, we threw out the Sat Nav and put in place design support from the 3L Diamond multiprocessor tool suite and a bit-accurate and MATLAB compatible C/C++ model, testbench, datasets and data generators. If you want to test drive our extreme FPGA FFT processing solution contact your local Sundance sales office or email us at enquiries@sundance.com. It's unbelievably fast and furious, but easy to handle.

PARS Scoops IET Software Design Award We are absolutely delighted that the Institution of Engineering and Technology (the IET) has recognized the outstanding contribution that PARS has made to multiprocessor design, by naming it winner of the prestigious Software in Design category at the IET's 2008 Innovation Awards. PARS (Parallel Application from Rapid Simulation) beat off stiff competition from the likes of BAE Systems to claim the winning ticket, and the award is testament to our focus and effort in delivering outstanding DSP+FPGA multiprocessor design solutions. Put simply, PARS enables application designers to generate system target code, including DSP codes, FPGA codes and all of the required inter-processor communication and synchronization codes from a Simulink model. Created as a value-add companion to The MathWorks model-based design flow, PARS boasts multiple design wins and also supports The Mathworks RTW-EC and HDLCoder. 1. PARS accepts a Simulink model as input, and helps users partition the Simulink model into several tasks that will be placed on different DSPs, GPPs and/or FPGAs. PARS helps users calculate the size and type of all data transfers between different tasks and then generates the C source code with all necessary inter-task/ inter-processor communication functions. 2. PARS then compiles, links and configures the tasks to build a single application file that can be downloaded into the parallel processing network. All the booting and task placement information is built into the application file together with all bit streams for the FPGAs in the system. 3. PARS also checks the Simulink model for the presence of any possible deadlock, and in case it finds any deadlock in the model, PARS tries to resolve them. In cases where the deadlock cannot be resolved automatically, it will report the source of deadlock and guide the user to resolve it manually. If you have a multiprocessor design in your schedule, or are scratching your head with your current design, check out PARS, it might just help! For more information email enquiries@sundance.com or contact your local Sundance Office.

Ultra Wide Band Modular Design One of the most tangible benefits of our modular design philosophy is the ability our customers have to dropin replacements, or upgrade core modules and functionality without having to redesign their system. This was what the guys at MIT found out when they used Sundance to help build an Ultra Wideband (UWB) communications development platform. The backbone of the MIT system was our SMT118 carrier that implemented amongst other things the com port interface and the hardware reset for all the connected modules. Housed on one of the SMT118's CPU TIM sites was the SMT391-VP that served as reprogrammable signal processing module. Featuring a Virtex2Pro VP30-6, it had direct access to the output from the connected ADC that was capable of digitally sampling two independent input signals at 1 Gsample/sec. On the second and third TIM sites the team connected a custom carrier board to connect the control FPGA and discrete transmitter to the SMT118 carrier. Add to this a Discrete Down Converter, oscillator, USB-Host link and advances in technology and changing specifications, and you can see why modular design makes sense from a financial and technical perspective. The MIT team found that the combination of a modular design and an easy-to-use interface promised to make the UWB development platform an effective tool for both developing and demonstrating cutting edge UWB communication systems. And we agree with them. One final thought, if the MIT team were able to achieve what they did using Virtex2 Pro FPGA for their signal processing module, imagine the possibilities if they revisited their UWB design using the latest Sundance 'Radio Giga' solution that features Virtex 5 Xilinx FPGAs, Dual C Series TI DSP engines with 260MBytes/ s Serial RapidIO (SRIO) communication links, Power PC processor cores and 6 channels of low power GHz ADC. If you'd like to take the 'imagine' and convert it to 'reality', get a Radio Giga system and get in touch! Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe. To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

eNews October 2008 - Special Edition

'SUNDANCE ROADSHOW' Throughout October to December 2008 you can find Sundance on the road at the following conferences, technical events and trade shows.

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Events SMT702 Radio Giga Sundance OEM PARS RASS Press Releases Previous eNews

Date

Event

Embedded Systems 26th - 30th Oct Conference

4th Nov

NIDays 2008

location Hynes Convention Center - Boston - Mass, USA The IET, Savoy Place, London, UK

Electronica 11th - 14th Nov Automotive Conference

New Munich Trade Fair Centre, Germany

16th - 19th Nov UK@CERN 2008

CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Switzerland

19th - 21th Nov

Embedded Technology 2008

Web link

Pacifico, Yokohama, Japan

If you want to talk to use, arrange a product demonstration or reserve a new product preview, please take advantage of the Sundance team being in your own backyard and contact enquiries@sundance.com

Signal Processing Nirvana With the move beyond 3G, the increasing ubiquity of wireless and ever increasing demands upon infrastructure such as a broadband cable, designers are crying out for new development environments. Environments that on the one hand can be reassigned to different communications technologies and applications, whilst at the same time providing common platforms that are user configurable by processing fabric, architecture, comms ports, memory and protocol. In a nutshell that's what Radio Giga delivers, and we use the work nutshell advisedly. Not only does Radio Giga feature multiple Virtex 4 and Virtex 5 Xilinx FPGAs, Dual C Series TI DSP engines, processor cores and 6 Channels of 1GHz e2v ADC; Radio Giga is 1U compliant and delivered to the customer in a 'Tardis' like form factor. Radio Giga is supported by a comprehensive design environment that encompasses software, hardware and model based design. The hardware design is consistent with our pledge to backwards compatibility and to get you going we've also provided a system demo. And to end our story with a question, 'What is Radio Giga?'…according to design engineers, it is their signal processing Nirvana. For more information on Radio Giga go to www.sundance.com; view the press release or contact your local Sundance Office.

Extreme DSP + FPGA PXIe Solutions Our SMT7xx Series covers more than 25 modular PXI Express DSP/ FPGA solutions. Showcased at ESS will be our Dual - ADC PXI Express Hybrid Peripheral Module, the SMT702. It provides 8-lanes of PXI Express and features 2 channels of 3 GHz ADC that can be combined to deliver 6 Gsps, and high density Xilinx Virtex 5 LXT FPGA devices optimized for logic and serial I/O. The generic product building block for the 7 Series is the SMT700 that introduces extreme FPGA acceleration to the PXI Express standard. The SMT700 features a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA with connectors for serial interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet and fibre optic modules...amongst others. With this new series of products we have increased our ruggedized offering and can better service customer where PXI compliance is critical. If you want more information view the press release, visit www.sundance.com or contact your local Sundance Office.

Sundance Modules go OEM 'You can't keep a good thing to yourself'…or is it that 'you can't get too much of a good thing'? Either way, our investment in years of product development and manufacturing capacity has yielded an array of submodules and daughter cards that provide functionality across a broad range of functions and applications. This investment in design and manufacturing has enabled us to be first-to-market with some of the most flexible and cutting edge multiprocessor solutions. For the first time this module 'mine' is now being made available to customers outside of the Sundance family. Customers who are seeking a fast and straight forward route to pre-optimized and pre-verified module based component solutions. Modules available under the OEM solutions banner range from Dual MIMO RF to Dual WiMax RF, Camera Link to Dual Gigabit Ethernet, and DAQ modules from 125MHz through 1GHz. Across the range there is a choice of form factor, on-board memory configurations and max Bus speeds that reach 1.25Gbps For customers who need to fine tune the modules to their own unique specification, IP based Design Packages are available that include source code, schematics and VHDL. Design Packages are subject to license agreements with Sundance, but are offered on a royalty free basis. For more information about our component OEM solutions contact your local Sundance Office or enquiries@sundance.com for more information.

Complex algorithms get embedded at Sundance When the United States Navy's Advanced Technology Engineering Group needed to find a home for their ultra complex, ultra sophisticated electronic warfare algorithms, Sundance stepped up to the plate and provided a unique hybrid DSP-FPGA hardware and a model based design solution to program it. Housed inside the Sundance DSP8080-AIMM (Altitude Interference Mitigation Module) system, the Navy's system architecture and algorithms are helping to improve the warfighter's surveillance of the battle space. The DSP8080-AIMM combats communication interferences from unwanted sources and provides pin point accuracy for remote ship, tank and aircraft operators in understanding the source of a signal. Provided in a compact, lightweight and low cost configuration, the DSP8080-AIMM accommodates beam forming of a high quantity of digital drop receivers (> 100 channels) and can interface to a range of coherent tuners. The system is flexible enough to provide radio direction finding and geolocation by-product, and outperforms its nearest competition in price, performance, size and weight. Key to making the DSP8080-AIMM a reality for the Navy was the decision to use PARS (Parallel Application from Rapid Simulation) design environment. PARS generated the entire target code including, DSP codes, FPGA codes and all of the inter-processor communication and synchronization codes from a Simulink model. The Navy's algorithms were implemented as either IP cores on FPGAs or optimized DSP code targeting the floating and fixed point DSPs. The DSP8080 utilizes multiple high-performance DSPs from Texas Instruments, including the TMS320C6416, a fixed-point processor running at 1 GHz, and the TMS320C6713, a floating-point DSP. The system also utilizes several Virtex 4 SX55 Xilinx FPGAs with the processing elements mounted onto a range of integrated Sundance platforms including the SMT374, SMT364, SMT318-SX and SMT361Q. Commenting on the work completed with the Navy and on the DSP8080, Jacob Alamat, marketing manager for high performance processors at Texas Instruments said, "…we're proud to be part of this unique solution for the Navy.' So are we!

It's all about performance… Well at Sundance we're not sure it is. In recent years there has been increasing interest in the role of FPGAs in the supercomputing mix. Yes they are a viable solution, but it's not just about performance. The SuperComputing computation mix is more complex. Power, performance (peak and sustained), communications latency, form factor, footprint, scalability, cooling BOM, energy efficiency, I/ O, memory, clock rate, cost and ease-of-design, are some of the variables that are taxing the minds of high performance computing (HPC) designers. It's with this in mind that we decided to design and build a solution that ticks these boxes for our HPC colleagues. RASS, our high reliability Reconfigurable, Accelerating, Scalable SuperComputing solution incorporates a lot of the know-how and features we have learned from over 2 decades of multiprocessor design. At the heart of RASS are banks of tightly coupled Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs. Sitting on a carrier, the multiple FPGAs can be connected via a Rocket Serial Link (RSL) I/O interface and the architecture is adaptable to different applications and computation demands. RASS integrates with industry standard processors and computing infrastructure. It features a modular, interchangeable array of high performance FPGAs and GPUs to deliver high performance, low latency and flexibility across single precision and double precision computation applications. And to mitigate the learning curve and risk of reliance upon proprietary tools and languages, RASS is supported by industry standard design tools and languages. Design support from the The MathWorks , Xilinx, 3L, Impulse, HDL and C/C++ providers offers a readily available development environment. The maturity of this ecosystem enables immediate access to libraries of intellectual property including Navier-Stokes, Black-Scholes, LINPACK, Monte Carlo and Amber. If you want to know more about RASS and see how it is 'mixing' it up in the HPC community click here or contact enquiries@sundance.com

eNews 'Hitch a ride with Sundance…'

October 2008

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We wouldn't tell you to do something that we wouldn't do (see next story), so you'll be comforted to know that Sundance has begun its roll-out of PXIe compliant products and solutions. We'll be debuting our SMT7 series of PXIe solutions at the Embedded Systems Show in Birmingham where we will be joined by our specialist PXIe partner Kane Computing.

SMT702 Events Press Releases Previous eNews

Our SMT7 Series covers more than 25 modular PXI Express DSP/ FPGA solutions. Showcased at ESS will be our Dual - ADC PXI Express Hybrid Peripheral Module, the SMT702. It provides 8-lanes of PXI Express and features 2 channels of 3 GHz ADC that can be combined to deliver 6 Gsps, and high density Xilinx Virtex 5 LXT FPGA devices optimized for logic and serial I/O. The generic product building block for the 7 Series is the SMT700 that introduces extreme FPGA acceleration to the PXI Express standard. The SMT700 features a Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA with connectors for serial interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet and fibre optic modules... amongst others. With this new series of products we have increased our ruggedized offering and can better service customer where PXI compliance is critical. If you want a sneak preview of the SMT7 Series see us at the ESS show, view the press release or contact your local Sundance Office.

…and get on board the PXI Express PXI, or PCI eXtensions for Instrumentation is a modular instrumentation platform originally introduced in 1997 by National Instruments. PXI is designed for measurement and automation applications that require high-performance and a rugged industrial form-factor. With PXI, you can select 3U or 6U modules from multiple vendors and easily integrate them into a single PXI system. PXI uses PC-based technology and an industry standard governed by the PXISA ensures ruggedness and system interoperability. PXI adds a number of features not found in the basic 132-Mbyte/s PCI interface, including a star trigger that allows precise synchronization between devices and a 10-MHz reference clock to all boards. There also is a dedicated trigger for each module. And, PXI has a propagation delay of less than 5 ns. In its 'Express' incarnation, PXI Express is moving test and measurement into its next generation. It builds on the PXI standard, offering higher performance and backward compatibility. As PXI was based on the PCI bus, PXI Express is built on the PCI Express high-speed serial interface. PXI Express gains much of its backward compatibility because of the compatibility between PCI Express and PCI. Importantly PXI and PXI Express boards can interact. So what's in it for you? PXI Express does more than just offer faster transfer rates, incremental lane expandability, and all the other features of PCI Express; it can also tackle new application areas such as video and software radio. With PXI Express timing and synchronization features are expanded. PXI Express uses a 100-MHz differential reference clock and provides differential triggers. Each PXI Express board can have up to a x8 PCI Express fabric connection, though the standard supports x1 through x8 connections. A PCI Express switch card or switch on the system controller provides host access to each card. Each hybrid PXI Express board has a PXI connector as well. This supplies access to the 10-MHz clock and star trigger support. A key new feature is the PXI Express hybrid slot that delivers support for both PCI and PCI Express signaling by taking advantage of available pins on high-density backplanes. This creates a level of backward compatibility not available in even desktop PC card-edge connectors. PCI Express uses the same driver and OS model as PCI, which ensures complete software compatibility for PXI Express. You don't need to revise driver software or application software for PCI Express-based systems. So in addition to providing hardware compatibility through the hybrid slot, PXI Express systems also helps you preserve existing software investments. If you still need more information on PXI Express or want data on our SMT7 PXI Express modular solutions, contact your local Sundance Office or email enquiries@sundance.com

Sundance hits the Road Continuing with the travel theme of this month's eNews, during the last quarter of 2008 and into the first quarter of 2009 you can visit Sundance and view our latest product innovations in the four corners of the world. We have organized a packed trade show and technical conference agenda where we can get up-front and close to our customers, and meet those who are new to Sundance or are interested in the multiprocessing juggernaut. We'll be visiting Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and USA. If you want to come and talk to us please see our schedule of events below, or email enquiries@sundance.com for more information. The Embedded Systems Show sees the launch of our SMT7 series PXIe solutions… don't miss it! If you can't make it to one of our events, remember we have Offices in China, continental Europe, the UK and USA. You can find your local Sundance Offices here. And of course you can always catch us online, 24 hours a day via our YouTube Channel @ http://www. youtube.com/user/SundanceVideos Date

Event

location

1st - 2nd October 08

Embedded Systems Show

NEC, Birmingham, UK

26th - 30th October 08

Embedded Systems Conference

Hynes Convention Center - Boston - Mass, USA

11th - 14th November 08 Electronica Automotive Conference New Munich Trade Fair Centre, Germany 16th - 19th November 08 UK@CERN 2008

CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Switzerland

19th - 21th November 08 Embedded Technology 2008

Pacifico, Yokohama, Japan

3rd - 5th March 09

Embedded World 2009

Nuremberg, Germany

Web link

eNews September 2008

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'…All we hear is Radio Giga…'

Radio Giga Sundance's Papers 3L Impulse Sundance OEM Solutions

To be perfectly straight with you, we doubt that our marketing budget would have stretched to hiring Freddie Mercury and Queen to support the launch of Radio Giga, but it would have been quite a sight. The consummate performer, swaggering and cavorting across the stage announcing to the world that Radio Giga from Sundance had arrived. But what we are very confident of is the new benchmark for performance, flexibility and cost that Radio Giga represents for the high-end communications market. With the move beyond 3G, the increasing ubiquity of wireless and ever increasing demands upon infrastructure such as a broadband cable, designers are crying out for new development environments. Environments that on the one hand can be reassigned to different communications technologies and applications, whilst at the same time providing common platforms that are user configurable by processing fabric, architecture, comports, memory and protocol. In a nutshell that's what Radio Giga delivers, and we use the work nutshell advisedly. Not only does Radio Giga feature multiple Virtex 4 and Virtex 5 Xilinx FPGAs, Dual TI DSP engines, processor cores and 6 Channels of 1GHz ADC; Radio Giga is 1U compliant and delivered to the customer in a 'Tardis' like form factor. Radio Giga is supported by a comprehensive design environment that encompasses software, hardware and model based design. The hardware design is consistent with our pledge to backwards compatibility and to get you going we've also provided a system demo. And to end our story in the musical vein that it began, 'What is Radio Giga?' ...according to design engineers, it is their signal processing Nirvana.

The what, where and how of Multiprocessor Design One of the many tasks that keep the Sundance team busy is working with customers to identify the best development approach for their multiprocessor design. Typically the designs are tough; they involve critical processing tasks, determining what logic to execute in which fabric and managing synchronization and communications between the various processing elements. In our latest White Paper Designing Multiprocessor Networks we have worked with Brian Durwood from Impulse and Hendri Veldman at 3L to synthesize our combined knowledge, experience and know-how into a straightforward and technical 'how-to' article. The target hardware we used was the SMT395 featuring a DSP from TI along with a Xilinx FPGA with embedded hardcore PowerPC. The application example is a channel-based multiprocessor system design. Stepby-step we explore some of the choices engineers have in executing logic in different hardware; logic that can be achieved in different stream configurations, in multiple processors and on single or multiple devices. With the input from Brian and Henrdi we look at a tool flow that is centered on 3L's Diamond and the ImpulseC tools. This flow delivers a layer of abstraction to the design process, automates the generation of HDL and helps the designer specify the tasks and processors in the system; how the tasks are connected and where they should run. If you have a multiprocessor design in your schedule, or are scratching your head with your current design, check out the article here or contact your local Sundance Office for more information.

Sundance Modules go OEM 'You can't keep a good thing to yourself' or is it that 'you can't get too much of a good thing'? Either way, our investment in years of product development and manufacturing capacity in the UK and China has yielded an array of sub-modules and daughter cards that provide functionality across a broad range of functions and applications. This investment in design and manufacturing has enabled us to be first-to-market with some of the most flexible and cutting edge multiprocessor solutions. For the first time this module 'mine' is now being made available to customers outside of the Sundance family. Customers who are seeking a fast and straight forward route to pre-optimized and pre-verified module based component solutions. Modules available under the OEM solutions banner range from Dual MIMO RF to Dual WiMax RF, Camera Link to Dual Gigabit Ethernet, and DAQ modules from 125MHz through 1GHz. Across the range there is a choice of form factor, on-board memory configurations and max Bus speeds that reach 1.25Gbps. For customers who need to fine tune the modules to their own unique specification, IP based Design Packages are available that include source code, schematics and VHDL. Design Packages are subject to license agreements with Sundance, but are offered on a royalty free basis. For more information about our component OEM solutions contact your local Sundance Office or email slb@sundance.com for more information.

Late news! KCL at Embedded Systems Show, October 2008

Kane Computing will be exhibiting at the above show, stand no. 415. Please come and talk to us and check out the exciting new DSP and FPGA based development products and systems.

Come register here -->

eNews Complex algorithms find their home at Sundance

July 2008

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When the United States Navy's Advanced Technology Engineering Group needed to find a home for their ultra complex, ultra sophisticated electronic warfare algorithms, Sundance stepped up to the plate and provided a unique hybrid DSP-FPGA hardware and a model based design solution to program it.

PARS DSP8080-AIMM DVIP RASS 3L Impulse

Housed inside the Sundance DSP8080-AIMM (Altitude Interference Mitigation Module) system, the Navy's system architecture and algorithms are helping to improve the warfighter's surveillance of the battle space. The DSP8080-AIMM combats communication interferences from unwanted sources and provides pin point accuracy for remote ship, tank and aircraft operators in understanding the source of a signal. Provided in a compact, lightweight and low cost configuration, the DSP8080-AIMM accommodates beam forming of a high quantity of digital drop receivers (> 100 channels) and can interface to a range of coherent tuners. The system is flexible enough to provide radio direction finding and geo-location by-product, and outperforms its nearest competition in price, performance, size and weight. Key to making the DSP8080-AIMM a reality for the Navy was the decision to use PARS (Parallel Application from Rapid Simulation) design environment. PARS generated the entire target code including, DSP codes, FPGA codes and all of the inter-processor communication and synchronization codes from a Simulink model. The Navy's algorithms were implemented as either IP cores on FPGAs or optimized DSP code targeting the floating and fixed point DSPs.

The DSP8080 utilizes multiple high-performance DSPs from Texas Instruments, including the TMS320C6416, a fixed-point processor running at 1 GHz, and the TMS320C6713, a floating-point DSP. The system also utilizes several Virtex 4 SX55 Xilinx FPGAs with the processing elements mounted onto a range of integrated Sundance platforms including the SMT374 , SMT364 , SMT318-SX and SMT361Q . Commenting on the work completed with the Navy and on the DSP8080, Jacob Alamat, marketing manager for high performance processors at Texas Instruments said, "-we're proud to be part of this unique solution for the Navy." So are we! Want to know secrets of DSP-FPGA design and build? At Sundance we're proud of having led the development of DSP-FPGA systems for the past 20 years. During this time we've learnt a thing or two about how make these systems work, how to build them and how to design them, and we are now sharing this with the designers across the world through our YouTube channel. Simply go to YouTube and enter your favourite Sundance product name and you just may be lucky! To give you a head start, we've listed a few of our favourites below. Happy viewing. ● ● ● ●

Let Stephen Malchi help you get to grips with PARS More PARS video tutorials See the guy's at 3L introduce you to multiprocessor design using Diamond Watch Kay Crail show you how to build an application using pre-built DSP and FPGA tasks

It's all about performance! Isn't it? Well at Sundance we're not sure it is. In recent years there has been increasing interest in the role of FPGAs in the supercomputing mix. Yes they are a viable solution, but it's not just about performance. The SuperComputing computation mix is more complex. Power, performance (peak and sustained), communications latency, form factor, footprint, scalability, cooling BOM, energy efficiency, I/ O, memory, clock rate, cost and ease-of-design, are some of the variables that are taxing the minds of high performance computing (HPC) designers. It's with this in mind that we decided to design and build a solution that ticks these boxes for our HPC colleagues. RASS, our high reliability Reconfigurable, Accelerating, Scalable SuperComputing solution incorporates a lot of the know-how and features we have learned from over 2 decades of multiprocessor design. At the heart of RASS are banks of tightly coupled Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs . Sitting on a carrier, the multiple FPGAs can be connected via a Rocket Serial Link (RSL) I/O interface and the architecture is adaptable to different applications and computation demands. RASS integrates with industry standard processors and computing infrastructure. It features a modular, interchangeable array of high performance FPGAs and GPUs to deliver high performance, low latency and flexibility across single precision and double precision computation applications.

And to mitigate the learning curve and risk of reliance upon proprietary tools and languages, RASS is supported by industry standard design tools and languages. Design support from the The MathWorks , Xilinx, 3L , Impulse , HDL and C/C++ providers offers a readily available development environment. The maturity of this ecosystem enables immediate access to libraries of intellectual property including Navier-Stokes, Black-Scholes, LINPACK, Monte Carlo and Amber, If you want to know more about RASS and see how it is "mixing" it up in the HPC community go to the RASS page or contact enquiries@sundance.com Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe. To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

eNews June 2008 ● ● ● ● ● ●

PARS 3L Suncance platforms CoDeveloper Diamond Sundance office

Squaring the Circle on Multiprocessor Design J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings tells of the quest undertaken by hobbit hero Frodo Baggins together with the fellowship of the ring: Gandalf the wizard; Merry, Pippin, and Sam, the hobbits; Gimli the dwarf; Legolas the elf; Boromir, man of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger named Strider. At Sundance our quest, and fellowship, is quite different to that of Frodo. It is not to save the world (!), but to deliver the highest performance multiprocessing platforms supported by the most comprehensive, effective and easy-to-use design ecosystem. Our ‘fellowship of the many processors' includes Texas Instruments, 3L, Xilinx®, The Mathworks™, the PXI™ Systems Alliance…and now Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc., creators of the CoDeveloper suite of C-to-FPGA design tools. This hot-off-the-press fellowship addition builds upon the joint development work between Impulse and 3L, the creators of the Diamond DSP/ FPGA multiprocessor development systems. CoDeveloper generates hardware outputs that can be implemented into Sundance platforms, supports system partitioning and enables the creation of hardware modules and processor peripherals from software code. Our design ecosystem now boasts a formidable array of joined-up design solutions including Code Composer Studio™ from TI, 3L's Diamond, CoDeveloper from Impulse, RTW-EC and HDLCoder from The MathWorks™, the PARS design tool that automatically generates target code from Simulink® models for distribution across multi-DSP/FPGA hardware, and comprehensive VHDL and Verilog support from EDA vendors including Synplicity. According to David Pellerin, Founder and CTO of Impulse. “The programming model is increasingly seen as the key to unlocking the true potential of multicore and multiprocessing architectures. Our partnership with Sundance opens new possibilities for designers targeting DSP/FPGA/microprocessor systems.” There is one other important difference between Frodo's quest and ours. The Lord of the Rings was epic high fantasy. Sundance is firmly rooted in reality.

The New Sundance Product Catalogue. Request a hardcopy or available online or from a printer near you. Interested in the latest DSP/ FPGA/ embedded solutions? If you are, check out the latest Sundance Product Catalogue here Inside you can quickly search the content and get your hands on the Sundance modular solution that is best suited for your project. You can also get more information about our very latest and very high-end off-the-shelf solutions. These readily available products include over 10 high-end DSP-types, more than 10 Virtex-type FPGA, over 20 high-end ADC/DAC types, over 10 different I/O and peripheral types, more than 10 carrier interface standards and lots of memory configurations. Happy browsing, but if you'd still prefer to receive a hard copy, please contact your local Sundance Office. Diamond's Are Forever on YouTube Anybody who knows Sundance knows that we rave about the Diamond multiprocessor design solutions from 3L. Diamond is simply the most fit-for-purpose, high performance and easyto-use multiprocessor design environment. They have tools specifically optimized for complex DSP + FPGA design and provide comprehensive support across the Sundance range of modular hardware solutions. It you want to taste the difference that Diamond can make to your next multiprocessor design, check out the cut-down YouTube Diamond tutorial here or contact 3L direct at 3L@3L.com to obtain a DVD copy of this very comprehensive video tutorial.

eNews May 2008

The Road to Beijing With the 2008 Olympics just around the corner, athletes from around the world are heading to China. Conveniently for Sundance, the Road to Beijing starts at our Offices in Shanghai and represented by the SMT351T, our highest performing FPGA based modular solution ever, we are going for gold in 'Track and Field Upgradability!'

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The recently announced SMT351T features the Virtex-5 SX95T device that includes 640 Xilinx XtremeDSP slices capable of delivering up to 352 GMACs of DSP performance. The FPGA has direct access to 2GBytes of DDR2 RAM and a configuration PROM enables the module to be used stand-alone. But what makes the SMT351T really stand out from the crowd is its new benchmark in forwards and backwards compatibility for DSP-FPGA field upgradability. The SMT351T is pin compatible and functionally identical to predecessor Sundance modules stretching back more than a decade. It conforms to the Texas Instruments Module (TIM) standard and provides a fast and low risk route to adopting Virtex®-5 technology in a modular DSPFPGA environment. According to Tim Erjavec, director of embedded and DSP marketing at Xilinx, '…because the SMT351T is compatible with previous Virtex generations, customers can easily migrate their designs to the latest FPGA devices from Xilinx." Enough said! To see how you can quickly and easily migrate to the latest DSP-FPGA technology click here.

Supercomputing scales new heights Not content with Olympic Gold, Sundance continues to scale new heights with its breakthrough RASS Reconfigurable, Accelerating, Scalable SuperComputing solution. To meet industry demand for energy efficient, extreme parallel processing, RASS uses the very latest Virtex 5 FPGAs that include 640 Xilinx XtremeDSP slices capable of delivering up to 352 GMACs of performance. Sitting on a carrier board, multiple FPGAs can be connected via a Rocket Serial Link (RSL) I/O interface and the overall architecture is truly modular with over 20 different daughter card combinations available. Interfacing is a breeze for RASS. The SMT148-FX carrier board offers SATA, USB 2.0, FireWire, 1Gigabit Ethernet, RS485, RS232, LVDS interfaces. It also contains a Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA that includes two PowerPC cores that can be used as interface controllers, leaving the FPGAs free for extreme coprocessor acceleration. To simplify programming RASS is supported by high-level design tools from The MathWorksTM and Xilinx. RASS is compatible with Diamond® from 3L to offer an integrated development environment for the FPGA and PowerPC via an Eclipse front-end. And because RASS is much more energy efficient than processor only solutions, it has much lower cooling requirements and contributes to reducing the overall carbon footprint of IT. Overall it's a win-win solution that makes others 'green' with envy!

Outside of the Box

Thinking outside of the box is one of those phrases that is professed my many, but practiced by few. When Peter Robertson from 3L and Sundance's Flemming Christensen made waves in the multicore design debate they argued that the conventional shared memory approach was flawed. "People want to take code written for uniprocessors and magically turn it into something that will run on multiple processors, and can be made to run as fast as you like just by throwing more processors at it." As Robertson put it, "this is nonsense." With the challenge of multi-core design remaining the Holy Grail of Computing and Computer Science please join Peter and Flemming outside of the box, and above the parapet. Intel and AMD may follow… or perhaps they already have? 3L - Thinking outside the box

To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. If you would prefer not to receive future issues, you may unsubscribe. Questions or comments? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. Sometimes anti-spam services stop you reading what you want. To be sure your regular copy of eNews does not get blocked, just add the Sundance email address listmembers@sundance.com to the list of “Safe Senders” in your email address book. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

Sundance eNews - April 2008

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PARS ORNL Diamond The MathWorks™ SMT8121 Distributors Previous eNews eNews in HTML

A New Companion for Model-Based Design PARS, a breakthrough multi-DSP/FPGA design tool is helping engineers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to rapidly develop an advanced simulator for the US Army's next generation counterfire radar system. Created as a value-add companion to The MathWorks™ model-based design flow, PARS was used by Dr. Mark Buckner's ORNL team to automatically generate target code from the single Simulink™ model that represented their entire application. Code was then distributed across the underlying multi-DSP/FPGA hardware using 3L's Diamond multiprocessor tools. Diamond support enabled the application to communicate with the host-side running under Simulink and brought Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) capability to the development system. Mark's valuable engineering resources were focused onto application development, not learning various tools and writing C and VHDL code. The complexities of generating all the DSP, FPGA, booting, communication and synchronization code was handled by the design tools. With PARS now boasting multiple design wins, the latest version supports the RTW-EC and HDLCoder from The MathWorks™. Support for the new Sundance SMT8121 development platform is also in place and a new version with added capabilities for profiling DSP and FPGA subsystems and managing memory blocks is scheduled for release in the early summer. Take a tour of the PARS environment here

I'M ON A PLANE! In the near future you will be able to make calls and send texts to your colleagues, friends and loved ones, from your own mobile phone and in the comfort of your own airplane seat! The UK 's communications regulator, Ofcom, has given the green light for aircraft to install systems that will allow passengers to make calls and send texts. More countries are expected to follow suit. Airlines can apply for spectrum licenses and on-board base stations, or picocells will go live above 10,000ft. Aircraft calls will link up with mobile operators via satellite, and, it just may be that the enabling technology at the heart of this revolution is Sundance technology. With availability of Sundance's second generation SMT8121 communications development platform, developers of passenger aircraft communications systems have a flexible, low power high performance solution that was expressly designed to enable 'round-the-corner' communications services such as in-flight mobile. Used as the environment of choice for High Speed Direct IF by some of the world's leading electronics companies, the SMT8121 delivers 1Gsps performance and features low power, high performance FPGAs and DSPs connected to high speed data converters. It is supplied with the 3L Diamond design environment that allows designers to easily implement algorithms on any of the available DSPs, FPGAs and PowerPCs. The days of the plane as a no-mobile-zone are numbered. For more information on the SMT8121 click here Need to select a data converter? It's as easy as ADC. With Sundance's second generation SMT8121 focused on applications where sampling speed, data conversion accuracy, high input bandwidth and power consumption are key, the choice of analogue-to-digital conversion technology was critical. Sundance engineers selected dual channel fast GHz ADC technology from e2v technologies. The e2v solution met the GHz performance needed by the SMT8121 without compromising on power consumption, dynamic range or linearity. The e2v solution also supported deployment of the SMT8121 across its range of target markets including aerospace, defence and satellite. "The investment made by Sundance in our ADC technology is testament not only to the technical performance of our solutions but also the cost advantage we provide in very high performance systems." said Andrew Benn, Product Marketing Manager at e2v.

SMT8121 Questions or comments?? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. If you would prefer not to receive future issues of eNews, you may unsubscribe. To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

http://www.sundance.com/enews/

18/04/2008

eNews March 2008 ● ● ● ● ● ●

SMT365 SMT144 SMT111 Distributors eNews in HTML Previous eNews

Sundance Helps Develop Mine Detection System

Sundance, the leading supplier and manufacturer of advanced digital signal processing (DSP) and reconfigurable FPGA systems, played an important part in the development of state-of-the-art Portable Humanitarian Mine Detector (PHMD) technology. The PHMD system developed by QinetiQ used a pulse induction metal detector combined with a ground penetrating radar (GPR) array to discriminate between minimum metal antipersonnel mines and small metal clutter. The PHMD system was trialled in the field as part of a concerted effort to improve the speed and accuracy of mine detection. System processing, 3D focusing and anomaly detection was carried out using two of Sundance's SMT365 DSP modules tightly coupled to a high density FPGA. The SMT365 features a 600MHz TMS320C6416 Fixed Point DSP with 4800MIPS peak performance and 8 Mbytes of high speed ZBTRAM. The FPGA is a Xilinx Virtex II device and enables on-the-fly pre-processing of data before transfer to the DSP. Commenting on the project, Sundance MD Flemming Christensen said, "By combining a range of high performance and break-through technologies the QinetiQ team made a very significant contribution to improving the speed and accuracy of mine detection, and Sundance is proud to have played a part in that." For more information please see the press release.

The Sundance Family Keeps on Growing SMT144 - Sundance is proud to announce two new additions to its growing family of embedded processing solutions. Following in the footsteps of its SMT148-FX big brother, the junior SMT144 is a quad core DSP FPGA carrier module that punches above its weight and size. The SMT144 provides 4 TIM sites with each site having 4 ComPorts connected directly to a Spartan 3 FPGA that acts as a pre-configured ComPort routing switch.The four module sites enable maximum flexibility for a variety of DSP, FPGA, DAC and ADC applications. Connectors are provided to interface to RS232 – via USB controller, JTAG, SHB and USB2 (Cypress CY7C68013A) with power supply coming from a standard ATX PC connector.

SMT144 Embedded Module Carrier SMT111 - Sundance’s new embedded baby is the SMT111 that accepts a single TIM and SLB mezzanine module. A Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S200 FPGA provides the interface between the TIM ComPort and the USB and UART controllers.Like the SMT144 the USB2.0 interface is provided by a Cypress CY7C68013A. Signals from the SLB are connected to 5 LVTTL compatible ComPorts on the TIM connector and the TIM site itself can accept any FPGA or DSP module from the Sundance portfolio. At just 118mm x 90mm the SMT111 is baby in size but big in features and is compatible with Code Composer Studio and Diamond multiprocessor software tools.

SMT11 Stand Alone Module Carrier

Diamond Continues to Sparkle The long standing alliance between Sundance and 3L continues to grow with 3L’s best-in-class Diamond multiprocessor design tools now supporting Sundance’s SMT6048 USB driver, SMT148-FX embedded processing solution and the ultra powerful C6455 TI DSPs on the SMT362. By closely coupling C6455 DSPs, the highest fixed-point processing power in the C6000 range, with the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA the SMT362 provides developers of digital video products with stunning platform features and unrivaled performance and flexibility. Diamond support for the SMT362 enables designers to quickly harness the processing power and potency of the DSP FPGA combination.Housekeeping tasks are managed by the Diamond IDE, existing applications can be easily migrated to the new architecture and clean slate, custom design is simplified. Diamond supports partitioning across the DSP and FPGA fabrics so designers can reach the optimal design solution in the shortest possible time.

SMT362 DIGITAL Video Infrastructure Processor TIM

For more information about 3L, and Diamond support for the C6455 and SMT362 go to 3L press release.

3L Diamond IDE To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. If you would prefer not to receive future issues, you may unsubscribe. Questions or comments? Please email us at feedback@sundance.com. Sometimes anti-spam services stop you reading what you want. To be sure your regular copy of eNews does not get blocked, just add the Sundance email address listmembers@sundance.com to the list of “Safe Senders” in your email address book. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology is a limited company registered in England and Wales, 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS Please do not reply to this mail. It is an unmonitored account and your mail will not get read.

Sundance - High-tech Building Bricks!

What time is it?

February 2008 •

Events:

embeddedworld2008—Germany TI Developer Conference: North America

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Previous eNews

Funny, Sundance being a small but still Global company, with Customers, Partners and People in almost every time-zone in the World, I often find myself working in a pattern of never really being stressed about having to finish work at a specific time. I can always save my current work, and then go and collect the kids from whatever joyful activity that they have persuaded me to allow them to attend this time. If they are late – and when aren’t they? - I can continue, thanks to the wonderful Internet, with whatever work I was doing before; more R&D; reply to few a emails or chase you, our customers, for more of the valuable business that you have provided in the past or might be planning for the future. Gosh… - the time does fly and I have been so busy not being stressed that I had forgotten the fundamental rule of the Supplier <> Customer relationship, that is COMMUNICATION. The only real Sundance message I have for you today is to correct the mistake of not communicating for the past few months with our Monthly bulletin, “eNews”. I will promise to get my act together and make sure the next issue is on time and has valuable contents and an application story. My second message is slightly more obscure and totally voluntary in terms of you giving you a chance to reply or give feedback. Sadly there are no prizes for either I am afraid. The Lego© brick was invented 50 years old this week (Did anybody notice the Google letters were made of bricks on Monday?) and I had the fortune to play with these bricks as a child and I am sure, if you look closer to our product range, you can see I am still playing with ‘Brick’ designs within our Modular concept and having lots of fun. My question is: “Did you play with Lego??” Flemming Christensen Managing Director Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd Flemming.C@Sundance.com , Flemming_Sundance on Skype or +44 7 850 911 417 on my PDA some-where in the World.

To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. If you would prefer not to receive future, you may unsubscribe. Questions or comments? Please email me at feedback@sundance.com Sometimes anti-spam services stop you reading what you want. To be sure your regular copy of eNews does not get blocked, just add the Sundance email address listmembers@sundance.com to your list of “Safe Senders” in your e-mail address book. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd is a limited company registered in England and Wales, number 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

Sundance - Rapid Prototype Solutions!

Say “Bonjour” to Sundance France!

October 2007

SUNDANCE, leading manufacturer of flexible and modular hardware and software technologies for high-performance signal processing solutions on

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DSP, FPGA and embedded processors, has opened an office in France.

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Technology’s headquarters in the United Kingdom. This step forwards will

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Client’s success: XSTRIP

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The opening of the French office is an expansion to Sundance Multiprocessor increase efficiency by providing local customer support, technical support and enabling the expansion of the sales activities in “the hexagon”. Our existing French distributor is expected to strengthen the business development of Sundance’s commercial-off-the-shelf products, as well as the reputable integration service of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology. Sundance France is looking forward to offering you a premium quality service!

Zoom in on the first Virtex-5 FPGA modules The SMT351-T provides an FPGA-based module for a range of custom made signal

processing

applications

and

functions.

The

Sundance

local

bus

connected to the SMT351-T’s FPGA also allow use of the Sundance mezzanine daughter cards to provide analogue and digital data inputs and outputs to the FPGA. Sundance offers a range of medium and large FPGA modules built around the Xilinx Virtex-5 family: SMT351-T ( X i li n x V i r t e x - 5 F PG A )

• Virtex-5 LX50T with an access to 2 banks of 512MBytes of DDR-2 SDRAM, • Virtex-5 LX110T with an access to 2 banks of 1GBytes of DDR-2 SDRAM, • Virtex-5 SX50T with an access to a total of 1GBytes of DDR-2 SDRAM, • Virtex-5 SX95T with an access to a massive 2GBytes of DDR-2 SDRAM. The SMT351-T’s FPGA architecture is a high-density logic array optimized for digital signal processing and memory intensive applications. For instance, the Sundance’s

FC100

off-the-shelf

core,

certified

Xilinx,

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implemented to perform IEEE-754 compliant FFTs. This unique fast fourier transform IP core is configurable on-the-fly to execute from 256 up to 1M points floating-point FFT. All the other Sundance’s IP Cores (Wideband DDC, Polyphase filter bank, fixed-point FFT and JPEG compression) can also be ported to the Virtex-5 FPGA. S u n d an c e ’ s m o d u le architecture

The tricky integration of custom IP cores in the Sundance firmware for the SMT351-T is also made easy by using 3L Diamond FPGA and its interactive design environment (watch the 3L IDE interactive demonstration).

Microstrip detector for X-ray spectroscopy The Daresbury Laboratory has developed a new high-resolution silicon microstrip-based instrument in collaboration with Cambridge and Southampton universities for the study of dynamic processes using real-time X-ray spectroscopy. The XSTRIP detector system extends the scope of Energy Dispersive EXAFS instruments down to microsecond timescales, allowing better understanding of chemical reactions and phase changes, such as protein folding or the operation of catalysts. The data acquisition subsystem has been designed around a standard PC architecture using the Sundance modular solutions. This not only reduces the time and cost of development, but it also allows significant flexibility in the data processing architecture. The data acquisition continuously runs 32 channels of high-resolution 14-bit ADCs (four SMT356s run 8-ADC channels in parallel each) to digitise data at a rate of 160MSPS. Samples are then pre-processed in the SMT358 Virtex FPGA and stored into its 8MB of embedded ZBT SRAM, prior to be gathered to the fixed-point C6201 DSP on the SMT332. This data acquisition subsystem is mounted on two SMT310Q PCI carrier boards. These handle 320MB of data generated, and each of them provides four expansion sites for the two digitizer modules, the FPGA pre-processing and the DSP computation stages. The XSTRIP instrument has been completed after 18 months of engineering efforts and it has demonstrated high performance and flexibility for beamline 9.3 at the Daresbury Synchrotron Radiation Source. The system is up to 50 times faster than previous detector systems. XSTRIP has also been successfully tested at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France.

A rt i c le w ri t t e n i n c o o p e ra t i o n w i t h Jo n He a ds p i t h , Daresbury Laboratory, UK

E n e r g y D i s p e r s i v e EX A FS e xp e r i m e n t a l s e t - u p

X S T R I P PC - t y p e r ac k m o u n t c h a s s i s U p t o 6 4 d at a a c q u i s i t i o n c h a n n e l s

Sundance - Leaders in DSP and FPGA Solutions!

The Sundance technology receives the “Radio”

September 2007

The SMT349 is our first dual RF transceiver module able to operate in the 2.4GHz ISM band. This module targets applications for radio local area

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Mezzanines add-on card

networks, outside broadcasting links, radio frequency identification devices,

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Simulink HDL-Coder

Now, Sundance offers a newer RF module to enhance the range of emerging

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Client’s success: GSI

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Events: ET2007, Japan

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public telecoms, home networks, video and data links… “radio” applications that can be implemented using our FPGA-based hardware architectures: the SMT901 is the ideal extension of the Sundance software defined radio kit. This dual-antenna transceiver is a Sundance Local Bus mezzanine (SLB) card that can interface an embedded system to the worldband MIMO transmitter module in the band of 2.4GHz and 5GHz ISM bands. The SLB daughter cards would be ideal for use by OEMs in test instruments (ADC/DAC/DDS), mobile or nomadic communications (MIMO, WiMAX) and video recording and broadcasting (Multi-video channels, DVI, Camera-link).

Zoom in on Simulink HDL Coder

SMT901 2 x2 M I M O m e z za n i n e bo a r d

3L Diamond IDE

With the support of Simulink HDL Coder from The MathWorks, Sundance bridges the gap between the system design and the hardware implementation on the field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGAs) used in Sundance modules. Today’s system engineers and scientists are familiar with using the Simulink environment to simplify modelling and simulating their designs. Taking this one step further, Sundance customers can now gain a higher level of abstraction and convenience by using 3L Diamond FPGA to integrate this VHDL code into a complete application. Diamond takes care of all the integration burden, communication protocols and IP used in the Sundance firmware. 3L Diamond FPGA offers a solution to create a hardware task described in VHDL and incorporate it as a bitstream into the Diamond application image file; loading the bitstream is managed automatically. Moreover, Diamond IDE handles the interaction with Xilinx ISE through an interactive user-friendly environment based on the industry-standard Eclipse software framework. Sundance and 3L have validated the concept of Simulink HDL Coder on the SMT339 video acquisition and processing module featured in the digital video infrastructure platform (DVIP). 3L has also demonstrated that the code generated by Simulink HDL Coder is compatible with Diamond FPGA. Currently, the VHDL code auto-generated by HDL coder can be manually included into a 3L Diamond FPGA task. In the near future, a joint project with The Mathworks will allow Simulink HDL Coder to interface directly with Diamond to target Sundance hardware. This will allow users to design and interface with electronic system-level tools from a unique and powerful user interface.

DSP-based RF control system for FAIR FAIR is an international accelerator facility with intense and highenergy beams of antiprotons and ions designed for research purposes. The GSI RF Department is in charge of designing a fast DSP-based closed-loop RF control system in the context of the project FAIR. A first project led to develop a cavity synchronization system which allows the synchronisation of the gap signals of different cavities. The system was designed in such a way that the cavities may run at different harmonics. Now, it is also possible to synchronise the cavity with the beam thanks to a closed-loop beam phase control unit. The performance of the DSP-based phase and amplitude detector subsystem is sufficient to implement a beam-phase control or other radio frequency feedback systems. These digital low-level RF systems are typical of heavy ion synchrotrons. The delay caused by the system is less than 10us, and the accuracy of the detected phase is better than 1° for non-modulated signals. The overall system is based on different scalable modules which can be used flexibly in completely different applications. The DSP system includes analogue preprocessing in the IF range, ADC and DAC modules, suitable digital interfaces and convenient diagnostics features. The Sundance hardware consists of the SMT374 with two TMS320C6713 DSPs, and the SMT370 with high-resolution dual 14-bit ADC and dual 16-bit DAC channels. The modules sit on the SMT310Q PCI carrier board, that offers two further expansion sites. An RF maintenance and diagnostics project has recently been started to allow remote firmware management of all programmable devices. Furthermore, it will then be possible to collect and analyse diagnostics information from any relevant RF components on-site.

A rt i c le w ri t t e n i n c o o p e ra t i o n w i t h D r. - I n g . H a r a l d K l i n g be i l , GSI, Darmstadt, Germany

B lo c k d i a g r a m o f D S P - b as e d phase detector

SMT8046 D u a l f lo at i n g - p o i n t C 6 7 1 3 D S P s with dual acquisition channels

Sundance - Leaders in DSP and FPGA Solutions!

New range of Industrial small form factors

August 2007

With the need of more and more Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware in rugged and high-reliability applications, Sundance introduces an industrial

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PCI-104: SMT261Q-I

range of ultra-compact stackable carrier modules.

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Dual C64x+ DSPs: SMT362

specific range of temperatures from a minus 40 degrees to plus 85 degrees

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Video/Imaging: SMT339

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Events: MIMO Workshop

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Previous eNews

The SMT130-I is the PCI-104 carrier module designed for the IndustrialCelsius. For embedded and multi-task DSP control applications, the PCI-104 carrier module can host the quad-C6416 processor module (SMT361Q-I). These modules can now operate in some of the most demanding embedded application environments when their Industrial version is specified. The unique stacking technology allows multiple Sundance modules to be added to the system very simply with more stackable I/O expansion such as data acquisition modules. The scalability and the Sundance modular concept maintain good performance, reliability and maintainability. The obsolescence management is also improved by keeping software and hardware architectures compatible with the dedicated 3L Diamond DSP and 3L Diamond FPGA.

Zoom in on Hyperspectral embedded system Hyperspectral imaging is an advanced digital imaging process that identifies unique spectral features normally imperceptible to the human eye. Imaging sensors collect light and heat from selected targets, data is acquired and undergoes FPGA and DSP computing to discriminate the individual elements of SMT261Q-I I n du s t ri a l PC I - 1 0 4 D S Ps

light. These techniques yield information contained within the target for highlighting and identification. A Hyperspectral instruments could use the SMT384 to digitize up to four analogue channels from a focal plane array. A Virtex-4 FPGA module can be then used to filter and correct the pixel information before dual C6455 DSPs compute statistics algorithms in real-time. This system can easily be embedded into a compact and portable system by stacking two SMT130 carrier modules. Spectral characterization for efficient imaging detection using Hyperspectral processing techniques finds applications in for example: • Analytical Imaging and Geophysics reference, • Multi-spectral satellite imagery,

H y p e r s p e c t r a l e m b e d de d p ro c e s s i n g s y s t e m

• Target detection from the air, • Medical imaging and disease diagnosis, • Individual screening for drug use.

Video tracking & security surveillance Polytech’Clermont-Ferrand, a French Engineering school, ran a university project in partnership with Sundance. The main work was focused on building a standalone embedded system based on the Sundance advanced video system: SMT8039. This system is able to detect a person or an object in a public area from a video camera input. The application executes a tracking algorithm in real time. The targets are identified by a cross and a rectangular frame. The processing is implemented on the Texas Instruments DM642 DSP and the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA. The embedded application was designed with the 3L Diamond software to give best performance. The algorithm is split into four DSP software tasks and the frame-grabbing is done in the FPGA firmware: • Acquire the current image and store it into a buffer, • Subtract every pixel of the current image from every pixel of the first image (stored at the beginning of the process), • Compare each result with a threshold to get a black and white image. So the moving objects will be illustrated in black. • Calculate the barycentre of all the black points, and display the result on a console screen with a cross and a rectangle around the person. Typical video applications illustrated by this concept are:

S o f t wa r e a lg o r i t h m i n t o t a s k s

• Human and object detection, recognition and identification, • Person or object counting, • Traffic monitoring, Security and Surveillance IP Cameras...

SMT339 D i g i t al i m a g i n g m o d u l e

Sundance - DSP+FPGA System Experts!

Zoom in on DVIP for VIPs with IP!

July 2007

The Sundance Digital Video Infrastructure Platform (DVIP) is a new standalone solution built around a DSP+FPGA hybrid architecture optimized for video

•

The Sundance DVIP

acquisition and image processing.

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DSP Third Party Spotlight

TMS320C6455s) linked to three Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs. All devices can

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SMT148-FX60

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USB2.0 Driver & API

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Distributors

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The

DVIP

configuration

has

three

DSPs

TMS320DM642

and

dual

communicate via the DSPs’ SRIOs, and the Sundance Rocket-IO Serial Links to guarantee high-speed transfers. Processing tasks can be implemented using 3L’s excellent Diamond onto this network of processors and co-processors to compute in real time MPEG-4 SP/ ASP/AVC or H.264 SD/HD encoding algorithms. The power of the DSPs and FPGAs combination assure that the video codecs can sustain an excellent image quality without compromising the high frame rate or resolution. DVIP is the reference platform for Multimedia Set-Top boxes for WM9 consumer applications as well as an industrial approach for Multiple Video Security

and

Surveillance,

Video-on-Demand

and

Broadcast/Broadband

developments. The brilliant Sundance DVIP is featured in Texas Instruments’ spotlight. More Details

Smart Wireless Communications & Technologies imoOn will host the first 2-day workshop for “Commercial MIMOcomponents and Systems” on 13-14 September in Duisburg, Germany. nternational companies, R&D Laboratories and universities are invited to submit technical papers in the broad domain variety of MIMO systems, Smart Antennas, Algorithms, Testbeds and Measurements, etc... imoOn and Sundance, as strategic partners, will reveal the premium signal processing and reconfigurable development solution: MIMO2. This new system includes a dual RF front-end mezzanine dedicated to all D i g i t al V i de o Infrastructure Platform

WLAN applications in the range of 2.4GHz and 5GHz ISM bands. f course, the flexibility of the Virtex-4 FPGA modules will be capable of best hardware implementations for Wi-Fi and IEEE802.11 protocols. More Details

OEM Platform doesn’t spare a single Virtex-4’s... Customers are starting to see the benefit of this “All-singing-and-AllDancing” development platform that sports almost all interfaces ever created by Mankind (well, almost!). It has no less than 4 slots for expansion with more Virtex-4, like the SMT368-SX35 and SMT348-SX55 that host hundreds of ExtremeDSP™ resources. The SMT148-FX is built around the XC4VFX60 and Spartan-3 FPGAs: • Full-speed USB2.0 interface with an added RS-232 interface, • 1Gbit Ethernet interface to allow FX60’s MACs to run TCP/IP protocols, • ZBT SRAM to allow the PowerPC™ cores to have external memory, • 56 LVDS pairs for control of plasma-screen, motor-controller, etc… • 800Mbps FireWire with the protocols handled by an Virtex-4’s IP, • 2 High-speed Digital Busses (up to 250MB/s) to bespoke hardware,

S M T 1 4 8 - FX 6 0 S t a n d al o n e P l a t f o r m

• RS-485 interfaces for measurement and control functions, • Rocket-IO Serial Link to implement a PCI Express interface, • 4 SATA interfaces to connect storage solutions or more SMT148-FXs, • Five 8-bit external compatible interfaces to interface legacy devices, • 3 internal Comport multiplexed into 16 towards the expansion sites. Software support is provided for the USB interface that gives the same level of functions as the PC-based platforms from Sundance (SMT6025/ SMT6026). It will be enhanced with extra features when Diamond PowerPC™ is released (4Q2007). More Details

U S B 2 . 0 D ri v e r ( S M T 6 0 4 8 )

Sundance - DSP+FPGA System Experts!

Sundance hearts still belongs to Xilinx Virtex-4...

June 2007 •

Director’s note: Virtex-4

•

SMT148-FX60

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Client’s success: EREMS

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Exhibitions: Asia-Pacific

•

Distributors

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Our “love-affair” with Virtex-4 FX60 started from the early stages of the Virtex-4 family roll-out. The FX60 was our chosen flagship as it contains everything anybody could ever require (this week!). This was late in 2004 and we were hoping and expecting to supply our growing customer base with preproduction products in September 2005. How wrong could we be? The increased complexity, larger devices and high clock frequencies has surely made the task of design and testing a lot more tricky. But nobody could predict the delay to be years before we could ship working products. Well done to the Xilinx Team for actually making it happen as other companies might simply have forgotten about it and moved on. So why do Sundance have such crush on Virtex-4 FX60, and why can it be found on five new Modules that were released to production early this year? • Perfect number of FPGA slices for even the most demanding FFT, image compression or such demanding application. • Ideal physical size to fit on any Sundance Module, sufficient I/O pins and very cost-effective in comparison to other options. • Integration of dual PowerPC™ GPU for “MIPS-processing” tasks not suited to DSPs or FPGAs. • Hard-core IP-cores for Serial interfaces (MGT) that will allow PCI Express, Serial Rapid I/O and Sundance’s own Rocket Serial Link interface. What more can any Human ask for a little piece of silicon? OK, it does not make the tea… yet. Flemming CHRISTENSEN, Managing Director

S M T 3 6 8 FP G A b o a r d f o r XtremeDSP™ processing

Sundance’s Virtex™-4 enabled modules: In partnership with Texas Instruments and Xilinx, the Sundance Business Intelligence leads design engineers towards the new generation of Best-in-Class technologies for signal processing applications: • Dual C6455 processors: SMT362-FX60, • Video and Multimedia DM642 DSP: SMT339-FX60, • Coprocessor FPGAs: SMT348-LX160, SMT368-SX35 and SMT348-SX55, • Quad-site PCI express development carrier: SMT150-Quadro, • Industrial VME64/VXS carrier board: SMT329-VSX,

SMT362 Dual DSP for Serial RapidIO™ performance

• Embedded and standalone platform system: SMT148-FX60. More Details

Zoom in on the Real-Time Beacon Simulator EREMS specialises in the design of electronic instruments for high technology applications. EREMS has its own engineering, manufacturing and tests facilities located in the heart of the European Space region: Toulouse, France. For over 25 years, EREMS has been developing its expertise in the design for embedded systems integrated with customised software applications.

A rt i c le w ri t t e n i n c o o p e ra t i o n w i t h G . D e jo n g h e & B . C h a t e la n , E R EM S , Fr an c e

EREMS has designed and developed simulators for several generations of ARGOS and SARSAT satellite beacons. The last model used in acceptance integration and validation phase of the GALILEO Payloads programme. ARGOS and SARSAT satellite beacons enhance performance for data collection, search and rescue. Each simulator features: • A compact PC including one SMT395VP30 DSP module and an ADC board. This system computes and generates the modulation waves of the ARGOS/SARSAT beacons in real time (up to 32 at a time over 4 channels).

A R G O S /S A R S A T s i m u l a t o r

• Digitalised signals generated are controlled and transmitted in real time by the PC to the payloads. The user software interface and the DSP software were designed by EREMS using 3L Diamond. The DSP software code was developed and optimised in Texas Instruments assembly language in order to support the beacon data throughput. The instrument can generate the following type of modulations: BPSF, QPSK and GMSK. The simulation of transmission channel includes phase error, gain error, Doppler and quadrature error. More Details

T h e S M T 3 9 5 V P3 0 h y b r i d DSP+FPGA architecture

Sundance - DSP+FPGA System Experts!

eNews Multi-gigabit bandwidth for industrial system

May 2007 •

Multi-gigabits VME carriers

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3L Diamond design tools

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Client’s success: ALBA

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Conferences & Exhibitions

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Distributors

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The new SMT329 family of VME64 and VXS intelligent IO carrier modules accelerate Sundance into the next generation of industrial embedded systems. These carrier boards are built around a Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA. They provide an entire range of signal processing solutions closely coupled with the Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs, Texas Instruments C6455 DSPs and ADC/DAC sampling up to several gigahertz within a 6U form factor together with fast off-board communication links. By implementing the VME64 2eSST protocol, the SMT329-VME64 offers up to 2.56Gb/s across the VME parallel bus, while the SMT329-VXS and its 8-VXS serial ports give a massive 20Gb/s for data transfer to the Host. Featuring the usual comports for inter-sites links, the carriers also have RSL ports for gigabit serial inter-module communications. Moreover 4 gigabit Ethernet controllers are directly routed to the P2 rear connector. More Details

Configuring FPGA networks 3L Diamond FPGA now supports system architectures built around networks containing only FPGA modules. Design engineers can define all their FPGAs as processors in a Diamond configuration file, either directly or using the Diamond IDE, and then build a single application file. This one file will contain all the information necessary for booting each of the FPGA devices. The Diamond server running on the host PC can then load the network automatically using the host comport link. In fact, engineers will no longer need the Xilinx Parallel cable to load their FPGA bitstreams into Sundance’s FPGA-only modules. The JTAG boundary-scan becomes redundant as a communication mechanism once designers switch to the latest version of the 3L Diamond FPGA software. S M T 3 2 9 - V X S /V M E c ar ri e r m o du le

This new feature is ideal for prototyping as well as deploying OEM solutions without the time and hassle of manually booting each individual FPGA. More Details

Zoom in on the ALBA synchrotron radiation ALBA is a circular-shaped machine, called a synchrotron, that uses arrays of magnets, called insertion devices to generate bright beams of synchrotron light. ALBA will be located near Barcelona.

A rt i c le w ri t t e n i n c o o p e ra t i o n w i t h D r . F r an c i s P e r e z an d A n g e la S a lo m , C EL L S , S p a i n

A synchrotron is an accelerator of electrons. The electrons are maintained in a circular ring by magnetic field and produce X-Rays tangentially to their trajectory. These X-Rays are used by several beamlines located around the storage ring to analyse samples for chemistry, materials science, magnetism, life sciences, macromolecular crystallography and industry. CELLS, a consortium in charge of building the synchrotron, has chosen the SMT8036 Kit to design and build a prototype of Digital Low Level RF system for the ALBA synchrotron. The Sundance system is intended to be used to regulate amplitude voltages (within 0.1% rms), phase (within 0.1° rms) and resonant frequency of the RF cavities of the accelerator machine. This type of cavity restores the lost energy of the electron beam due to synchrotron radiation and they also focus the X-Ray beam longitudinally.

The new ALBA synchrotron

The 500MHz RF input signals are down-converted to 20MHz IF by a front-end module. The IF signals, which are equivalent in phase and amplitude to the RF signals, are sent to the ADCs to be demodulated into I/Q components. The FPGA regulates the amplitude, phase and resonance frequency of the cavity with control and tuning loops. The DACs transform the IF control signals into analogue signals that are finally up-converted to RF in a second analogue module. The DSP connected to the FPGA reports 14 diagnostic signals, generated in the FPGA during the processing stage, to the Host PC. All of the I/Q reference, I/Q cavity, I/Q computed and I/Q control actions signals are stored and displayed using a MATLAB interface. The ALBA synchrotron is currently being built. The initial 7 beamlines will be able to start their operations from 2010 to carry out a wide variety of experiments using ALBA’s light.

T h e S M T 8 0 3 6 du a l A D C /D A C w i t h m i xe d D S P + F P G A

More Details To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. If you would prefer not to receive future, you may unsubscribe. Questions or comments? Please email me at feedback@sundance.com Sometimes anti-spam services stop you reading what you want. To be sure your regular copy of eNews does not get blocked, just add the Sundance email address listmembers@sundance.com to the list of “Safe Senders” in your email program. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd is a limited company registered in England and Wales, number 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

Sundance - Embedded Co-Processing Technologies!

eNews The PowerPC™ saga continues in your FPGA

April 2007

The PowerPC™32-bit RISC processor core is supported in the Sundance’s firmware for the Virtex-II pro (SMT338VP30, SMT398VP70) and Virtex-4 FX (SMT339, SMT362) modules and carrier boards (SMT148-FX standalone, SMT150Q PCIe & SMT329 VME64/VXS).

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Embedded PowerPC™

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Review of SMT339 by Xilinx

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Client’s success: SUNRISE

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Conferences & Exhibitions

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Distributors

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eNews in HTML

The mixed DSP, FPGA and PowerPC combinations provide the most powerful embedded processing solution for all aerospace and defence prototypes, wireless communications, multimedia broadcast and industrial control and supervision systems.

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Previous eNews

More Details

After having connected a comport between a PowerPC and a DSP module, controlled some LED peripherals from a PowerPC, Francois has now successfully demonstrated how to access 4MB ZBTRAM from the PowerPC’s On-chip Peripheral Bus (OPB) and Processor Local Bus (PLB) in the SMT339’s FX60 with Xilinx Platform Studio tool suite and the Sundance software functions.

Sundance give you a rendezvous' After the big events of RTS Embedded Systems 2007 (Paris, France), Embedded World (Nuremberg, Germany), Components for Military and Space Electronics (Los Angeles, USA): DSP Valley has kindly invited Sundance, as their associated partner, to participate at the DATE’07 exhibition in Nice, France. DSP Valley is a technology network organisation, focusing on the design of hardware and software technologies for digital signal processing systems. Sundance will be next represented by KK ROCKY at the 10th ESEC expo in Tokyo, Japan. The Software Defined Radio Development Station (SDR-DS) and the Advanced Imaging (SMT8039) systems will be demonstrated live! S M T 1 4 8 - FX S t an da lo n e c a r r i e r

Sundance will also take part of several worldwide seminars that will be announced soon in our website... More Details

Zoom in on the SUNRISE mission SUNRISE is a mission to study the structure and dynamics of the solar magnetic field. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (CSIC) in collaboration with other research institutes supply the Imaging Magnetograph Experiment (IMaX).

A rt i c le w ri t t e n i n c o o p e ra t i o n w i t h J o s e L u i s C as t i l lo , R e s e a r c h e r, I A A , S p a i n

IMaX is an experimental solar magnetograph that produces very high resolution vector magnetograms of the solar surface with a spatial resolution of 70 km. IMaX is one of the post focal instruments of the Sunrise mission that contains a 1 metre aperture telescope. The stratospheric balloon is planned to fly for 10-12 days from the Antarctica in the framework of the NASA Long Duration Stratospheric Balloon. Image acquisition and camera control is made with two dedicated SMT374 boards. The FPGA main task is camera control, image accumulation and pre-processing (demodulating the Stokes signals). The DSPs are in charge of compressing the image with a lossless algorithm. The DSP Master synchronises the Host computer, the acquisition and demodulation logic, the optical devices logic, and the other three DSP coprocessors. The coprocessors are used for the lossless JPEGLS compression of images. Communication between DSPs is done through a proprietary bus called IMaXBus: a hardware and software layer that abstracts the connections between DSPs and FPGA. As information transferred through the IMaxBus is accessed by a custom SDRAM controllers, all memory operations use long bursts making the whole system very efficient. It allows the images to be directly transferred from one CCD, connected to DSP Master, to any other DSP in the system. The images are demodulated, compressed and sent to the DSP Master. A header is added to every image and then it is sent to the Host for further processing, telemetry and storage. The continuation of IMaX instrument includes the integration and calibration tests with solar light (2007), integration in the SUNRISE platform (2008) and polar flight (2009).

T h e S UN R I S E L o n g D u r at i o n S t r at o s p h e r i c B a l lo o n

T h e S M T 3 7 4 du a l f lo at i n g p o i n t D S Ps an d V i r t e x - I I FP G A

Sundance - Real Time Digital Signal Processing!

eNews Light up the Virtex-4 FX’s PowerPC™ Cores After announcing PowerPC™ support for the Virtex-II/pro family last October, Sundance has now established a communication link between the PowerPC™ RISC processor cores in Virtex-4 FX FPGAs, and multiprocessor systems. Up to two IBM PowerPC 405s can be used for custom hardware acceleration and co-processing thanks to Xilinx EDK and the SMT6400 support package. Real Time Operating System (RTOS) for the built-in PowerPC core will be based on 3L Diamond Embedded. The PowerPC tasks will be then able to communicate directly to FPGA hardware and DSP software tasks. The SMT362 with its mixed parallel architecture based on dual C6455 DSPs and a Virtex-4 FPGA can be used to terminate IP-based protocol such as TCP or UDP thanks to the cutting-edge Gigabit Ethernet MAC system built-into the Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA. More Details

Zoom in on the Fast Host Interfaces

March 2007 •

SMT145 - PCI-64 Carrier

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SMT339 - DM642 + FX60

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SMT362 - C6455s + FX60

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SMT368 - SX35

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SMT391 - Giga ADC

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SMT381 - Giga DAC

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Distributors

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eNews in HTML

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The steady proliferation of PCI Express and Gigabit Ethernet, with their fast point-to-point serial lanes will, in the future, make scalable image processing possible on a rack PC like an SMTPC3. For the time being however, the performance solutions are driven by the de-facto standard parallel bus of Peripheral Component Interface (PCI). The latest host motherboards do still feature the PCI bus and the performance from the more advanced 64-bit/66MHz bus of the SMT145 module carrier offers a bus bandwidth of over 500MB/s between our FPGA and DSP processing modules and the host PC. This includes all our new Virtex-5 FX modules that will be introduced later this year as well as the current Virtex-4 FX and Virtex-II Pro modules. Maximum data transfer speed to the host PC is required for the fast transfers found in multimedia systems. Optimised applications can be developed with the SMT339 populated with the TMS320DM642 DSP and the XC4VFX60 FPGA. The combination of this 64-bit PCI-X carrier and the SMT339 module is ideally suitable to achieve a real-time H.264/AVC encoding solution (reference design architecture by XILINX). Applications compiled with 3L Diamond can be held in and booted from the SMT339’s FLASH ROM to get a full standalone or embedded system.

64-bit/66MHz PCI-X with SMT339 Adv an ced Vision

More Details

I/Q Recording and Digitization Systems for Radio applications High-speed data acquisition, conversion and processing with modular COTS solutions find a wide range of applications in Software Defined Radio, Medical imaging, RADAR and advanced semiconductor research… With twin 8-bit ADCs sampling at up to 1GSPS per channel, the SMT391 is a perfect fit for IQ modulation algorithms. Better still, the SMT391 becomes a single 8-bit ADC channel sampling at 2GSPS when the ADCs are programmed to work in their interleaving mode.

SMT8191: 6 4 - b i t P C I - X wi t h S M T3 9 1 - S X3 5

The SMT381 is the ideal complement to the SMT391 with its dual 14-bit DAC channels outputting data at up to 1GSPS each. Each analogue daughter board can be fitted onto an SMT368 FPGA module via the Sundance LVDS Bus (SLB) connector. Then, the data recovery and processing can take place in the Xilinx Virtex-4 SX35 FPGAs. The architecture of the FPGA is tailored to implement ultra-high performance signal processing, as featured for example in the Sundance 1024, 2048 or 4096-point custom FFT cores. The cPCI/PXI carrier boards - SMT300 and SMT300Q - can integrate these modules in instrumentation racks to provide portable and standalone RF spectrum analyser and frequency synthesizer solutions.

SMT8181: 6 4 - b i t P C I - X wi t h S M T3 8 1 - S X3 5

More Details

To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. If you would prefer not to receive future, you may unsubscribe. Questions or comments? Please email me at feedback@sundance.com Sometimes anti-spam services stop you reading what you want. To be sure your regular copy of eNews does not get blocked, just add the Sundance email address listmembers@sundance.com to the list of “Safe Senders” in your email program. Sundance Multiprocessor Technology Ltd is a limited company registered in England and Wales, number 2440991 Registered office: Chiltern House, Waterside, Chesham, Bucks, HP5 1PS

Sundance - DSP+FPGA Embedded Systems!

eNews If you do not want to receive eNews, or you would like a colleague to be offered future issues, please use the links at the bottom.

How do all these proces sors talk t ogether?

F ebru ary 2007

X-link does the job! Sundance has for the past 18 years been manufacturing

multiprocessor

solutions.

migrating

from

one

generation to the next and maintaining compatibility between modules, 1997’s SMT331 (‘C6201 DSP @200MHz + XC4000 FPGA) is compatible with our latest dual ‘C6455s + Virtex-4 FX60 module - the SMT362! The inter-processor bandwidth has increased from an 8-bit comport that sustained ~100Mbit/s between DSP modules, to the current top-of-therange “Rocket-IO Serial Link” running flat-out at 2.5Gbit/s. The SMT362 has no less than 16 of these links, so its performance is an order-ofmagnitude higher than the SMT331 with 4 Comports. In line with this, progress in FPGA capacity and DSP parallelism boundaries have been shattered

over

the

last

decade.

Most

important

for

any COTS

development platform, is the fact that it is possible to replace an

Multipro cesso r modu les

SMT331 with an SMT362 by recompiling the application program only.

SMT362 (Dual C6 455 DS Ps) More Details

SMT374 (2 floa tin g-point DSPs)

Zoom in on the Lab’s advan ced research

SMT361 Q (4 fixed-point DS Ps)

ultiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology represents the use of multiple transmitters, antennas and receivers in wireless radio communications. Digital communication using MIMO is emerging as one of the most promising research areas in wireless communications.

Newsletter Spotlight

nternet and multimedia communications are now being integrated in wireless communications, and they really need high-data rate and large user capacity. MIMO systems tend to resolve these issues by simultaneously offering high bandwidth, improved range and high mobility at a lower cost. MIMO has key applications especially in streaming video and music, video surveillance, VoIP, video conferencing, interactive Gaming, Mobile TV, RFID…

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Questionnaire 2007

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SMT8094-T: MIMO Tx

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SMT8094-R: MIMO Rx

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MIMO-DS and SDR-DS

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Where to meet Sundance?

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ost standards for wireless LAN, digital video broadcasting and 4G mobile broadband aim to use the combination of both MIMO and OFDM technologies.

rthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique well suited for multi-path wireless environments. Coupled with the smart antennas to exploit the spatial domain and software defined radio (SDR), these key technologies enable the wireless industry to deliver the future economic, flexible and scalable wireless network architectures in multi-user systems. Now the research focuses on the integration of multiple antennas in mobile terminals...

More Details

A Flexible and Scalable 4x4 MIMO tran sceiver system Various MIMO configurations can be used in telecoms applications. For instance, a 2x2 MIMO architecture is able to simulate a base station (with 2 antennas to transmit signals) and a mobile terminal (with 2 antennas to receive signals). From a performance point of view, upgrading to a 4x4 MIMO system will quadruple capacity as the MIMO capacity grows linearly with the number of antennas. The Sundance 4x4 MIMO transceiver system can be hosted in the Development Station. There is also a similar system for SDR Development.

SMT8094 -T Transmission terminal

The transmission part (SMT8094-T) is powered by the 1GHz DSP module (SMT395VP30) to control the four 16-bit resolution DAC output channels of the two SMT350s. Each SMT350 is controlled by a Virtex-4 SX35 FPGA (SMT368) that can implement DSP hardware algorithms. The reception part (SMT8094-R) comprises the SMT395VP30, connected via the SHBs to two 1GB DDR-SDRAM memory modules. These SMT351-G embedded memory boards store the high-speed data coming from the ADC stage. The four 14-bit ADCs of an SMT384, plus its SMT368 FPGA-base module compose the sampling stage.

SMT8094 -R Receptio n terminal

Both Tx and Rx platforms are mounted on their own PCI-type carrier board (SMT310Q). Support for cPCI, VME, PC104-type carrier boards are also available from Sundance. More Details

To make sure you get the future issues of eNews, you may subscribe. If you would prefer not to receive future, you may unsubscribe. Questions or comments? Please email me at feedback@sundance.com Sometimes anti-spam services stop you reading what you want. To be sure your regular copy of eNews does not get blocked, just add the Sundance email address listmembers@sundance.com to the list of “Safe Senders” in your email program.

Sundance - Your DSP & FPGA Development Partner!

eNews If you do not want to receive eNews, or you would like a colleague to be offered future issues, please use the links at the bottom.

How are we doin g? January 2007

Although we pride ourselves in the service and support we provide to you, we also acknowledge that there is always room for improvement. Therefore, as a valued customer we would deeply appreciate if you take a couple of minutes to fill in our customer perception questionnaire. The answers you supply are completely anonymous, and the results will be used to further enhance the service we provide. You can access the online survey from the following internet link: http://support.sundance.com/questions/questions_2007.html More Details

A splitter to pu t them all together...

SMT384 , design ed for in terlea ving and ca scade architectures

The SMT594 is not a simple “Gadget” from Sundance to plug into the SMT384. It is an engineering adapter circuitry that turns your four ADC channels into one single analogue-to-digital input channel. The sampling

Newsletter Spotlight

frequency can reach up to 500MSPS using the interleaving methodology inside the FPGA-base module over the four input channels.

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Your opinion counts!

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Quad 14-bit ADC module

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ADC/DAC calibration core

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Simulink add-on for Video Kit

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Simulink add-on for Radio Kit

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The analogue performances of SMT384 can be improved by an efficient digital correction inside the FPGA. This task is done by the new FC201 IP core from Sundance. It is designed to optimized some key parameters for any ADC modules. The designer can tweak the general offset, gain and delay correction in order to enhance the effective number of bits (ENOB) of the analogue-to-digital converter. This core is an hardware task that is fully compliant with the 3L Diamond FPGA concept. The main advantage of the SMT384 is its accurate and programmable clock circuitry based on the AD9510 device that allows synchronization of several modules. System designers can cascade as many SMT384 as they wish to push the boundary of the most demanding applications. More Details

Zoom in on Modelin g Framework for Hybrid Architectures Hardware and software co-design methods, and simulation-in-the-loop are innovative approaches to design high-performance solutions with a very high level of abstraction. It consists in the modeling of algorithms with general subsystems from toolboxes integrated in a MATLAB/Simulink framework without worrying about any implementation aspects. Once the algorithms are verified and validated within the simulation environment, the compilation starts after a manual HW/SW partitioning. Automatic optimized DSP and FPGA codes towards C-programming and VHDL are respectively generated to let place to the real co-simulation onto the Sundance’s hybrid DSP+FPGA platforms.

SMT368 , FPGA Blo cks ets

The modules communicate with the MATLAB graph viewers via the carrier boards that implements a link to the Host PC while the real external stimuli (video capture, analogue or digital signals) are directly applied to the platform. The algorithms implemented can be finely tuned with accuracy as the result is immediately observed and interpreted from the hardware itself. Sundance offers support for the SMT8096 Software Defined Radio and the SMT8039 Advanced Video Imaging systems. The SMT6096 (also integrated in the SDR-DS) and SMT6039 add-on for the Simulink environment give a Hardware/Software co-design toolboxes for rapid prototyping.

Model of th e SMT350 Dual 1 4 -bit ADC/ 16 -b it DAC

Ideally suitable for system level engineers, the Sundance’s toolboxes targets both designers from the hardware and software worlds to build some efficient solutions onto proven platforms quickly. More Details

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Sundance - Partners from Prototype to Product!

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Do not miss the next Shin kansen... The new SMT150Q is in the early stage of its life with the Sundance design engineers, but the first results seem to be promising for 2007.

January 2007

So why not reserve it now to be sure to get your Premiere tickets? The carrier board can host up to four Sundance modules, and it is populated with the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 that provides the 20 Rocket-IO Serial Links. Four lanes of the PCI express bus are directly connected to the Host PC for high-speed transfers. More than a fast communication link to the Host, the SMT150Q provides rapid inter-module communication via the Rocket-IOs. The data rates reach up to 250MB/s through the full-duplex serial links. External equipment can connect via up to four Serial ATA rear panel sockets that are also directly routed to the FPGA bridge to allow access to the PCIe carrier. Full JTAG IN/OUT connectors

Happy New Year 2007 from Sundance!

are present for DSP debugging purposes, and extending the processor JTAG chain to other Sundance’s carriers. The SMT150Q also works in a

Newsletter Spotlight

stand-alone mode to suit embedded solutions requesting high-speed data transfer within its network of various modules. More Details

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SMT150Q PCIe carrier

Sun dan ce is orbiting with the Stars!

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DSP in SPHERES by MIT

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Space Systems Laboratory

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3L Diamond Eclipse

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chose the SMT375 as the main processor board for its SPHERES facility. SPHERES is a program which operates multiple micro-satellites aboard the International Space Station. The free-floating autonomous satellites help researchers at MIT, NASA, other research institutions, and private industry to mature technologies for Distributed Satellite Systems. The satellites are used to develop metrology, control, and autonomy algorithms

for tasks such

as autonomous docking and satellite

formation flight. The SMT375 was chosen to replace an original C40 TIM used in the prototype. The availability of a module with new processors dramatically simplified the upgrade to the flight units. The C6701-based board more than tripled the SPHERES processing power from the prototype. The satellites are able to provide scientists a pseudo-operating system structured specifically to help them develop the algorithms. Further, with the help from Sundance the MIT SSL developed a boot-loader to reprogram the satellites while at the ISS. Depending on the tasks on hand, the satellites can be reprogrammed to perform tasks on the specific area that the scientist is investigating.

S HERES op era ting aboa rd th e In terna tion al Spa ce Ship (this picture is kindly provided by NASA)

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Read about the Total Di amond Ecli pse: Live in 2007 3L goes for the most popular open development platform to enhance its Diamond software with an Interactive Development Environment. Eclipse is an addition to Diamond that transforms the software into a smooth and elegant design environment in which you can create, build and execute Diamond applications. The main advantage of this new Eclipse IDE for Diamond is the automation of most of the housekeeping tasks. For instance, the configuration files are now interactively done and auto generated from selections in graphical interfaces. Creating configuration files is now a “click and play” job, rather than a tricky manual job in complex

3L Diamond ,

multiprocessor systems. Eclipse will make life easier for the designers

Eclipse-ba sed d esign tool

using Diamond, and the Sundance’s platforms of course. More Details

Sundance - The DSP & FPGA Development Force!

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Is massive paralleli sm en ou gh? All the “newswires” are talking about the long-awaited SMT362 recently launched onto the embedded systems market by Sundance. The

December 2006

SMT362 is well known as the hardware reference for the popular HD digital video broadcasting plans and the baseband processing for emerging 3.5 and 4G of telecommunication standards. The SMT362’s two DSPs are built with the newest and enhanced C64x+ core, improving algorithm parallelism and reducing code size. Its FX60 FPGA is directly mapped into the DSPs’ memory maps to exchange data via the EMIF interface. The massive resources of the FPGA make it like a giant pre and post processor unit for the DSPs. The Virtex-4 also features 2 embedded PowerPC cores, which may be used as coprocessors, various interfaces such like Gigabit Ethernet and

S MT362 ,

Rocket-IO transceivers allow rapid communication to the outside world.

Dua l C645 5 DSPs & Virtex-4 FX60

Large DDR2-SDRAM capacity can serve the most demanding algorithms whilst the Flash ROM transforms this data processing module into a complete standalone solution.

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Zoom in on the VxWorks Driver su pport

eal-time embedded technology is an important element in most of the

recent

electronic

applications.

VxWorks

real

time

architecture and operating system targeting the RTOS market.

he Sundance platforms support the famous VxWorks development

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SMT362

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SMT6065

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SDR-Development Station

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University promotions

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Distributors

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environment using the latest SMT6065. The software interfaces for

the SMT6065 driver and the user API use the generic C++ programming language. The SM6065 also includes software examples fully tested and validated for VxWorks version 5.4 and Tornado version 2.0.

perating systems like VxWorks, designed for real-time embedded environments have a master control program that can provide

immediate response to input signals and transactions.

upport is provided for the Sundance’s SMT310 and SMT310 Quattro carriers for the PCI-based environments ; SMT300 and SMT300

Quattro for the compact PCI-based industrial environments and PXI instrumentation systems. VxWorks completes the range of OSs supported: Windows (SMT6025,

SMT6026), Linux (SMT6035, SMT6036) and QNX (SMT6055).

Sundance wish you a Merry Christmas!

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Sun dan ce promotes Academic Research Sundance is proud to offer Universities the opportunity to access highspeed signal processing solutions based on the latest technologies. Over 80 universities worldwide have already joined the Sundance University program to kick-start their R&D projects. Sundance has selected three main platforms according to the main interest of the recent research groups: Software Defined Radio, Advanced Video-Imaging, Industrial control & Radar processing. More Details SDR Forum has selected SUPELEC, a French Grande Ecole of Engineering,

SDR-Development Station, for the Smart Radio Ch allenge

to participate at the Smart Radio Challenge ’07. SUPELEC and the Signal, Communication and Embedded Electronics Research Team aim to resolve the communication interoperability question for cognitive radio supporting multiple standards. SUPELEC has chosen the proven Sundance SDR-DS to develop their advanced engineering project with confidence.

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Sundance - Rapid Prototype Solutions!

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Multimedia an d Video applications

November 2006

Nowadays digital video applications are the interest of research teams aiming to define the future real time audio-visual applications. The SMT339 is populated with a highly-integrated multimedia DSP (TMS320DM642).

This fixed-point architecture is enhanced with the

XC4VFX60 silicon device used as video accelerator and coprocessor. This subsystem, a masterpiece of integration particularly suits finely tuned DSP algorithms with a hardware/software design approach. The GDD400 library will perform the best processing with optimized imaging and graphics functions for the C6000 and DM64x DSPs. Camera Link, CMOS sensor, Firewire, Audio ports, fast Ethernet, and other user-defined I/O accessed through the Sundance LVDS Bus allow custom daughter-boards to share all this power. Control is made from

S MT8039 ,

the PCI interface through the SMT310 carrier.

Real-Time Imag ing S ystem

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Zoom in on IP cores by Sundance

Newsletter Spotlight

Sundance offers a range of ready to use IP cores for FPGA modules. These hardware cores are implemented to get the best performance of digital signal processing algorithms.

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SMT339

• VHDL designers can now use a proven FFT core based on a radix-32

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GDD400 library

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IFFT/FFT core

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Filterbank core

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JPEG core

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Distributors

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architecture and having up to 1M points resolution. • The FFT core can be coupled to the polyphase filterbank core to process the data coming from an ADC such as the SMT391 in its interpolation mode, or the future 2GHz single ADC channel SMT386 (year 2007). • The imaging core can compress video flows in a performing JPEG format supporting theoretical speeds of 500 fps at a resolution 1280x1024. • Custom and off-the-shelf IP cores are also available from rfengines.

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Parallel Application for Rapid Si mu lation (PARS) PARS is the model-based design solution for systems utilizing parallel processing techniques and comprising DSPs and FPGAs. Thanks to 3L Diamond, (the back end of PARS) users can now design and simulate complex systems within MATLAB/Simulink environment and then automatically generate target code for the combination of DSPs and FPGAs being used. This advanced tool was originally developed under a US Navy contract and is being used for designing sophisticated SDR systems and hardware-inthe-loop applications. Multi-DSP/FPGA systems like the SMT368, SMT395Q, SMT362 and fast DAQ boards are fully compliant. It increases the system level view and helps users to better benefit from the hardware flexibility and modularity

Mod el-ba sed design so lu tion

offered by Sundance to design rapid prototyping solutions.

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Sundance - Leaders in DSP and FPGA Solutions!

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W hen the F PGA meets DSP... Sundance’s DSP modules are composed of a hybrid architecture

October 2006

combining one Xilinx FPGA, and one or more TI DSPs to energize the computation power using the FPGA as DSP coprocessor. It significantly multiplies the flexibility of systems solutions for digital filtering, FFTs, DDCs, DUCs… and saves multiple DSP clock cycles used to compute pipelined instructions. 3L’s Diamond integration tools maintains the simplicity of multi-processor systems with a common task methodology for both DSP and FPGA devices to run complex and high-performance signal processing algorithms. Our first class quad 1GHz DSP module (SMT395Q) allies the VP70 FPGA coprocessor with four high-powered DSPs for an intensive computing solution. More Details

S MT395 Q, intensive co mputin g solution

Zoom in on MIMO-DS for digital communication s Is it possible to get solutions for multiple wireless communication standards onto a unique flexible, reconfigurable and scalable platform?

Newsletter Spotlight

Increasing the user data rates within a constrained frequency spectrum for wireless communication systems has been the subject of many years of research and development efforts. All conclusions seem to converge on MIMO (Multiple Inputs Multiple Outputs) technology… Sundance’s

MIMO-Development

System

“smart”

prototyping

platform for the high-capacity wireless world. The Sundance MIMO-DS allows to prototype a range of communication standards for 3G up to the most demanding 4G-type of communications known as 802.11n. The Sundance solution is flexible, and it can be tailored to adapt to the users’ requirements by using our range of signal processing modules. We also would like to introduce mimoOn. This young start-up company promotes the MIMO technology for professional wireless area networks and cellular networks… Having Sundance as a partner! Other R&D labs

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FPGA coprocessor

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Sundance MIMO-DS

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Embedded PowerPC™

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JTAG Solution: SMT107

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Next Trade show: JAPAN

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illustrates “MIMO prototyping using Sundance’s hardware and Software products” as well. More Details

Breathin g life in to the PowerPC in you r embedded system Sundance connects to the SMT398VP70’s PowerPC™ 32-bit processor core in its firmware. Now customers can program embedded applications in their FPGA with Xilinx EDK combined with SMT6400 software functions. Up to 2 embedded IBM PPC 405s can allow strong co-processing in the FPGA. The PowerPC 405 embedded-environment architecture adds even more flexibility to your design. Using the mixed DSP, FPGA and Embedded PowerPC combinations provide the “Price/Performance” solution for all aerospace and defence prototypes, wireless communications, multimedia broadcast and industrial control and supervision systems.

S MT398 VP70 : up to 2 PowerPCs

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DSP+FPGA Experts!

S U N D A N C E M U LT I P R O C E S S O R T E C H N O L O G Y

eNews The “eNews” is a Sundance newsletter and will contain technical updates, product information and company news. If you do not want to receive “eNews”, please unsubscribe with the link below. If you feel that a colleague would benefit from getting future issues, please forward the details using the subscription form below.

September 2006

After the summer break, gear u p for Vi rtex™-4! Sundance enables DSP with the latest Xilinx FPGA to realise designs: • that demand a high ratio of signal processing to logic, • with high-performance logic and connectivity, • with embedded processing and high-speed Rocket-IO Serial Links. This draws attention to our range of LX, SX and FX FPGA-base modules. They

will

support

all

your

innovation-driven

signal

processing

applications, including the next generation of wireless communication systems such as smart antennas and MIMO. More Details

Sun dan ce Virtex-4 FPGAs Zoom in on FPGA-base modu les SMT348LX160 is populated by a XC4VLX160 with a –11 speed grade. The FPGA allows running 16MB of QDRII at 250MHz. With 150,000 Logic Cells, it gives massive resources to tackle intensive implementations.

Newsletter Spotlight

SMT368SX35 is the middle range of the SX family with 192XtremeDSP™ slices and 8MB of ZBT. This module is suitable for Rapid FFT processing and IF processing in SDR Development Stations.

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Virtex™-4 FPGA

SMT348SX55 is a powerful combination offering 256 GMACs processing

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FPGA-base modules

ideal companion for DSPs in real-time processing systems.

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Diamond DSP & FPGA

SMT339FX60 is the DM642 DSP module with the XC4VFX60 coprocessor

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Wireless MIMO paper

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Brand new Homepage

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Distributors

performance with a large amount of QDRII memory. This module is the

to enable Multimedia applications ranging from VoIP up to HDTV and video compression. All of these modules implement the Sundance LVDS Bus to interface to the outside world or connect to Sundance’s mezzanine modules (from Dual ADCs and DACs at 1Gsps, to Quad ADCs at 125Msps).

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Advan ced software techn ology for All Sundance does COTS for COST to get you to market — FAST! But you should know that your design can get “jet wings” with Diamond DSP design tools for Sundance’s modules. Diamond DSP and FPGA helps all System designers, Hardware designers and Algorithm developers to speed up developments. Through advanced software technology, Diamond reduces your final project costs by slashing your deadlines.

Dia mo nd fo r Sund ance More Details