 Many customers begin designing systems using General Purpose Processors (GPPs). This was the case for a military customer of BittWare.
Our customer’s original system design was based on an array of GPP-based computers to run their sophisticated algorithms. However, the physical size of their original design occupied a bay of multiple racks. They needed to port this design to fit within a torpedo. To do so would necessitate using high-end signal processing boards to replace the computers, but also maintain a small footprint for the end system.
BittWare’s solution used both DSPs and FPGAs on an application-specific 6U VME board – a hybrid design. A high-density Altera Stratix II GX 1508 pin FPGA provided the front-end processing. The FPGA contains two Nios embedded processors running uClinux™ and interfaces to USB 2.0 input data. The FPGA peripherals include a 10/100/1000 Mbit Ethernet controller, two USB 2.0 peripheral ports, one USB 2.0 host port, RS232/422 port, two DDR2 controllers, two SDRAM interfaces, and a flash interface. Two clusters totaling eight TigerSHARC DSPs provide the high-end floating-point processing. BittWare's ATLANTiS FrameWork runs on the FPGA and provides all data routing on and off the board, as well as between the DSPs and FPGA. For data storage, eight GBytes of DDR2 SDRAM provides ample space.
In the end, the customer’s success was ensured as BittWare met their signal processing requirements within the physical constraints defined by the torpedo. |
