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Performance Plus Performance

To illustrate the raw processing power of FPGAs, Tekmicro has implemented an "Extreme FFT" core using the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro product line.  The Extreme FFT core does 1 million 4K point FFTs per second, using about 1/3 of the available resources in the VP70 FPGA.  This is far faster than any general purpose processor.  The VP70 dissipates only about 12-14 watts, which is much less than most general purpose processors, so it doesn't require heavy heat sinks or exotic cooling methods.  The processing rate is fast enough to match the sustained data rate from the ADC converters on the board. When this board is fed with I and Q signals, it performs real-time FFTs across a 2 GHz band.
 
 
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Happy Holidays
 
All of us at TEK Microsystems wish you and yours a very happy, healthy and safe holiday season and a prosperous 2008.
 
 
     
 Density, Density and Density
 
SIGINT applications usually involve streaming large amounts of data into the system from some sort of antenna or sensor array.  The data are put through relatively simple processing, such as FIR filters, down converters or FFTs.  A key feature of these processes is that each input point is involved in relatively few operations. 

Because of this, the three most important things in any embedded SIGINT application are density, density and density.  Density translates directly to size, weight and power, but power "counts twice", because the system not only has to supply adequate power to the boards, but also provide adequate cooling.  Cooling can be the hard part of the problem, especially if forced air is not adequate for the job.  Anything that reduces the power and cooling requirements is a double win for the design.
 
 
FPGAs  Precisely Solve the Problem
 

FPGAs can provide much better processing power per watt than any sequential processor for signal processing applications.  An FPGA-based design can connect an input port directly to the appropriate processing circuitry.  The processing chain can be designed to match the input data rate to get efficient use of the FPGA's resources.  Some FPGAs have thousands of pins available for I/O. 

SIGINT applications involve very special purpose problems.  Using an FPGA, the designer can precisely tailor the design to solve precisely the problem at hand.  This results in a much more efficient solution, which means a lighter, smaller and cooler one.  Further, FPGAs are inherently parallel:  the designer can arrange the logic elements in parallel chains with as many chains as make sense for the problem.  Each chain acts as a separate processor and parallel processing is achieved with a single chip, not several.
 
 
System on a Chip
 
FPGAs such as the Xilinx family have version types that have embedded general purpose processor cores along with standard logic slices.  This gives the designer powerful sequential processing resources to add to the other logic resources of the FPGA.

Tekmicro's JazzStore SoC is an FPGA-based data recorder core.  The FPGA with embedded PowerPCs prepares the data, controls the disk, runs the file manager and then sends the data to the RAID array using the Fibre Channel protocol.  The performancePrismtech is determined only by the speed at which the array can accept data, typically 165 Mbytes/sec or faster.  The file system is compatible with the FAT32 standard, so the disks can be read by Windows or Linux workstations.  The VP50 or VP70 versions of the Virtex-II each have two embedded PPCs, so two independent recorder channels can be implemented using one FPGA.  In addition, a single high speed data stream can be divided into two slower streams for recording. 

Larger data recording systems can easily be configured using Tekmicro's extensive VXS board and system products.

For a complete evaluation of using JazzStore SoC in your program requirements, contact us directly. For complete product information visit tekmicro.com.