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Press Releases
June 24, 2010
BittWare's ATLANTiS FrameWork Simplifies FPGA Integration and Implementation
Integrated system framework provides productivity enhancement resources, validated HDL components, and software libraries, accelerating time-to-market for FPGA-based signal processing applications
CONCORD, NH - June 24, 2010 - BittWare, a leading supplier of high-end COTS signal processing solutions, announced today the release of their ATLANTiS FrameWork (AFW), an integrated system framework implemented in Altera's Stratix FPGA family. The many benefits of designing with an FPGA: high-speed, reconfigurable I/O, and considerable computational throughput even at low clock rates - also come with limitations: no peripheral infrastructure, no common API, no on-chip processing or control paths, minimal libraries available, and no standard methodology for implementing an FPGA design. These limitations require that most of the design effort be spent on infrastructure and integration, dampening FPGA productivity and severely hampering the designer's ability to experiment, tweak, and validate their FPGA components. AFW addresses these issues by providing an infrastructure that supports FPGA development at a higher abstraction level, promoting the efficient integration of existing application-specific code, as well as code reuse and portability. This allows for improved design exploration and validation, enabling designers to focus on developing their unique processing components rather than the infrastructure around it. The result: efficient FPGA design, lower development costs, and a faster time to market.
"While the development of FPGA components has made tremendous advances in recent years, it remains fairly difficult to integrate a large, complex FPGA project with I/O, processing, and control elements. The process can be extremely complex - something as seemingly trivial as trying an alternative processing component or changing bit widths requires a tedious re-integration", stated Jeff Milrod, President and CEO of BittWare. "If, as opposed to a "blank slate", designers had access to fully-validated and simulatable physical interfaces, I/O, and communications, as well as reconfigurable fabrics and resource management, they would not only be able to focus their design effort where it should be - on the application-specific piece - but would also be able to easily port parts or all of that design, simplifying the next design phase. To facilitate the efficient implementation of complex signal processing on FPGAs, a simpler approach to FPGA component and project integration is required
... BittWare's ATLANTiS FrameWork."
AFW provides reconfigurable FPGA components along with the infrastructure necessary to implement, simulate, synthesize, validate, and deploy a complete FPGA architecture. Fully validated FPGA physical interfaces for all board-level I/O and communications along with proper timing constraints and I/O configurations are included. Each component can be easily monitored and controlled via Altera's open standard Avalon Memory Mapped Interface. Similarly, Altera's open standard Avalon Streaming Interface is used to implement point-to-point data transport between AFW components. A set of reconfigurable fabric components expand the interconnect options for both memory mapped and streaming interfaces.
AFW Technical Details
ATLANTiS FrameWork includes:
- Standard API for communication between a functional component and its sources, sinks, masters, and slaves
- Streaming data interconnect fabrics such as switching, mux/de-mux, FIFO, data reshaping (bit width, clock rate, etc.) and common adaptors such as VIP streaming data
- Memory mapped fabrics such as address decoding and arbitration, interrupt handlers, reset infrastructure, and storage (dual port memory and register banks)
- Validated physical interfaces with proper timing constraints and I/O configurations
- SerDes Protocols providing validated SerDes components for BittWare hardware
- Utility functions typically used in signal processing such as scale, round, saturate, magnitude estimation, magnitude squared, and min/max
- Interfacing functions such as initialization, scaling, resize, reshape, and array
- Simulation and test resources such as scripted simulation control, standard data generators, verification and diagnostic components, and bus functional models (BFM)
- Example and template projects
Software Development Support
AFW is tightly interconnected with BittWorks BittWare I/O (BWIO), a collection of device drivers and utilities providing:
- AFW component drivers and a standard POSIX-based interface (open, read, write, ioctl, close)
- Portability to multiple different hosts including TS201, embedded FINe/NIOS and PC/LINUX (remote)
- Convenient access to resources on the target board
- Control over AFW FPGA components
- Ability to easily change code to support alternate hardware, effectively decoupling the I/O logic from the processing logic
Availability
ATLANTiS FrameWork is now available, supporting BittWare's Altera-based products including the Stratix IV GX and Stratix II GX board families. BittWare also maintains a developer site specifically for those customers developing FPGA applications with AFW which provides downloads for every AFW product release, as well as release notes and related AFW documentation.
About BittWare, Inc.
For over two decades, BittWare, Inc. has been a leading designer and manufacturer of FPGA computing and hybrid (FPGA and DSP) board-level solutions based on Altera’s FPGAs and industry leading DSP technology. The company provides the essential building blocks required by OEMs for developing and deploying their innovative systems in defense, communications, instrumentation, and life sciences applications. BittWare’s product offering addresses OEM needs from prototype-to-production and span a variety of platforms, including VPX, VXS, AMC, CompactPCI, FMC (VITA 57) and XMC. For more information on BittWare and its innovative FPGA and DSP solutions, visit www.bittware.com.
All products are the trademark or registered trademark of their respective holders.
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