 Regardless of the application, space is an issue. This is especially true when dealing with consumer electronics. Cameras, PDAs, cell phones - every generation is smaller than the one before. Many of these designs consist of a PCB populated with an ASIC and minor surrounding logic. But an ASIC is a costly endeavor; you only want to do it once. The design needs to be tested, tweaked, and tested again before it is finally ready to be put onto silicon. BittWare's boards often provide the perfect test bench during the research and development phases of our customers' designs.
One such customer is among the top wireless telecommunications companies in the world. They needed to develop a test bed to quickly evaluate various next generation wireless communications protocols such as Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). The final system would eventually condense down to an ASIC, but multiple R&D systems were required to test and tune their compute-intensive algorithms.
The test platform would need to be very high performance with tremendous flexibility as they would be continuously updating and adapting their algorithms in real-time. The type of data they would be analyzing required that the system be able to handle extended precision and dynamic range. BittWare's B2-AMC, a hybrid signal processing
Advanced Mezzanine Card, provided the perfect solution. The combination of a high-density Altera Stratix II FPGA
with four TigerSHARC DSPs enabled this customer to create a test system that offered complete flexibility coupled with the high-end digital signal processing their application required. |
