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HERON FPGA Modules with Virtex^®-II 

The HERON-FPGA and HERON-IO modules that use reprogrammable Xilinx Virtex^®-II FPGAs have options up to 8Million gates per device - combine as many modules as you need to get the right features - the modules can exchange data at up to 400Mbytes/second in each direction using FIFO connections! Add off chip memory accessed at 500Mbytes/second and I/O at 100s of Mhz and you can put together systems with almost limitless capabilities! 

The Virtex^®-II FPGAs that we use have thousands of Configurable Logic Blocks, which can be linked together to form any logic function you choose. To help make them more useful for real time systems and DSP they offer built in multipliers, memory and clock management devices. The I/O pins are programmable and can support many different formats - LVTTL, LVDS, PECL etc, so you can construct almost any interface you require. With multipliers and memory you can also build many DSP functions such as filters, FFTs etc, and because these functions are made in hardware, they are all being executed at the same time!

The FPGA configuration developed in VHDL, is normally downloaded using the HERON Serial Bus, but after development is complete embedded systems can use on board PROMs to configure the FPGAs on power up. 

Along with many example projects we provide the Hardware Interface Layer which allows you to access the module hardware with guaranteed signal timing and logic - leaving you free to concentrate on your application VHDL. We give you lots of VHDL to use in your system - functions like CameraLink, FPDP, Digital Down Converters, Image Processing functions etc.

ExtremeDSP™  from Xilinx makes a lot of signal processing functionality available to the developer. Blocks like Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), Direct Digital Synthesisers (DDS) and even FIR filters are supplied as standard with the Xilinx tools. We supply several worked examples of such functions that can be used as demonstrations of using FPGAs but can also be useful starting points for the development of your project. 

We are often asked for modules with larger FPGAs, see how you can use multiple modules in your system to achieve the number of gates you need. 

Below are the modules with Virtex-II FPGA available now.   See also HERON modules with Virtex^®-II Pro and Virtex^®-4