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HERON FPGA Module with Virtex^® II Pro - FPGA with on chip PowerPC^® processor 

The HERON-FPGA Virtex^®-II Pro module uses a reprogrammable Xilinx FPGA from the Virtex-II Pro family. The Virtex^®-II Pro adds the functionality of a PowerPC^® core to the already popular Virtex^®-II FPGA architecture. These modules add PowerPC^® functionality to the range of HERON modules that can be used to provide your system requirements. You can 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! Our HERON Virtex^®-II Pro modules add off chip DDR memory accessed at 200MHz and I/O options at 100s of Mhz so you can put together systems with almost limitless capabilities! 

The Virtex^®-II Pro FPGA that we use has thousands of Configurable Logic Blocks, which can be linked together to form any logic function you choose. Embedded in the FPGA fabric is a PowerPC^® processor that can be directly linked to the on chip Block RAMs, off chip RAM and peripherals and the FPGA logic. We use FPGA logic to interface HERON FIFOs directly to the Block RAMs that the PowerPC^® uses as on chip memory.

As with our Virtex-II modules, the FPGA configuration developed in VHDL is normally downloaded using the HERON Serial Bus, but when development is complete embedded systems can use on board PROMs to configure the FPGAs on power up. You can also program the PowerPC using industry standard C and C++ compilers. The compiled code can be stored in the on-module FLASH memory or downloaded from your PC using our Server/Loader tool. We provide a tutorial to show you how to use the PowerPC on a HERON FPGA that has a Virtex^®-II Pro device. 

Users of the Virtex^®-II Pro will need to have a VHDL synthesiser tool such as Xilinx ISE^®, and also the Xilinx Embedded Developers Kit (EDK^®). Combined with the HUNT ENGINEERING software tools that you receive with your system, these are all the development tools you will need for your system.

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 great deal 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.