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Reconfigurable High Performance DSP systems
DSP systems often need to be reconfigurable; maybe so that a single system can perform many different tasks, perhaps to support future upgrades and enhancements. With Millions of FPGA gates, MFLOPs of processing power and I/Os at 100s of Mhz, HERON systems are programmable, providing flexibility to do what you want.
HUNT ENGINEERING doesn't program the systems - you (our customer) do that. However it should not be necessary for you to start the development of your program from the very low hardware level. At HUNT we see it as our job to provide you with the tools, APIs and libraries that you need in order to concentrate on developing the part of the system that is unique to your application. You should definitely not be expected to re-create low-level software that every customer would need (regardless of their application). That low-level software is better written by the engineer who designed and developed the hardware. That is the way we work at HUNT - the hardware designer provides the low-level software to enable you to use that hardware efficiently without needing to know the details.
For FPGA modules we provide template
VHDL projects that define all of the pinout, signal
standards and timings you need to access the hardware from the FPGA.
We also provide the Hardware Interface layer VHDL to access HERON-FIFOs using
dedicated FPGA hardware.
For C6000 modules we provide HERON-API,
a library that allows your software to access the HERON-FIFOs using the DMA
engines of the DSP.
For the Host (PC) we provide the Host-API software to access
HERON-FIFOs using the master mode hardware of the module carrier card combined with the correct
driver model for various PC operating systems.
A HEART module carrier allows you to use
those FIFOs to make real time 400Mbyte/second connections between modules.
Reconfigurable architecture for your
system
FIFO connections are configured by software using the HERON Serial Bus. You define the
connections you need in a simple text file, the HeartConf utility we provide does the rest.
If your reconfigurable system is to be used standalone or embedded you program your programs into PROMS so that the system can boot following a reset.
Alternatively your system might remain in a PC where it can be loaded using our Server/Loader tool without needing to have any development tools installed. Here you might use the STDIO features of the server to allow a C6000 program to access the Disk, Screen and Keyboard of the Host PC, or you can call the library version of Server/Loader from your own Host PC program.
Learn more about reconfigurable dsp systems from Hunt