 programmablelogicZONE Products for the week of April 9, 2007
Xilinx Says…
Launch Of Low-Cost Spartan-DSP Series
XtremeDSP solutions unleash breakthrough price-performance-power advantages for wireless and video applications
Xilinx, Inc. has introduced the low-cost Spartan-DSP series with development boards and enhanced design software, significantly expanding its offering of XtremeDSP solutions and establishing a new price-performance-power triad for digital signal processing (DSP). The Spartan-DSP series provides high DSP performance at the lowest cost points in the FPGA industry, delivering over 20 GMACS for under $30, while consuming up to 50 percent less dynamic power than other high-performance reconfigurable devices for DSP functions at this performance point.
With the addition of the new Spartan-DSP series, the XtremeDSP silicon portfolio offers three DSP-optimized platforms with a wide array of devices that provide DSP engineers with the flexibility to choose the right mix of features to match application requirements and easily migrate designs between platforms. As the first platform in the Spartan-DSP series, the Spartan-3A DSP platform provides the most cost-efficient devices optimized for wireless, video and consumer applications. This complements the higher performance processing of the Virtex-DSP series with the Virtex-4 SX and Virtex-5 SXT platforms targeted at high-end applications such as wireless base station and high-definition video including surveillance, broadcast and 3D medical imaging.
“Over the past few years, signal processing markets have demanded higher performance, cheaper DSP devices. Vendors also require delivery of complete platforms, IP and design environments to accelerate their time-to-market,” stated Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts. “With the new Spartan-DSP series and expanded line-up of XtremeDSP solutions, Xilinx is able to scale the performance and power advantages of their device portfolio to unprecedented price-performance points. This opens a range of new exciting applications that Xilinx and its customers can tap to grow their markets.”
These latest offerings facilitate a more efficient implementation of FPGA-programmable DSP co-processing platforms, a growing trend. FPGAs often complement programmable DSPs like the Texas Instrument TMS320 family in signal processing systems to implement system logic multiplexing and consolidation, new peripheral or bus interfaces, and performance accelerators in the signal processing chain. Further, the Spartan-3A DSP devices are part of the company’s platform-based DSP strategy and XtremeDSP solutions roadmap, which are supported with a comprehensive ecosystem of third-party DSP product and service providers.
New XtremeDSP Portfolio Member: Spartan-3A DSP Platform
The Spartan-3A DSP platform features the 3SD3400A device delivering over 30 GMACS and 2200 Gbps memory bandwidth and the 3SD1800A device with over 20 GMACS and 1500 Gbps memory. At the heart of the Spartan-3A DSP architecture is the new cost-optimized XtremeDSP slice (DSP48A) that enables designers to implement many independent arithmetic functions. The architecture also supports connecting multiple DSP48A slices to form wide math functions, DSP filters, and complex arithmetic functions without the use of general logic fabric, thereby reducing power consumption while delivering very high performance and efficient silicon utilization. The new DSP48A slice reduces power in common FIR filters by 50 percent compared to other high-performance reconfigurable devices.
“Xilinx innovation provides Vecima with the opportunity to do more for our customers in a more cost effective package,” said Scott Davis, director of technology strategy for Vecima Networks, Inc., a leader in the design and manufacture of communications products. “Integrating DSP slices into Spartan-3A devices allows us to more efficiently use programmable logic in our WiMax, DOCSIS, and digital video solutions.”
In addition to the XtremeDSP DSP48A slice, the Spartan-3A DSP platform delivers up to 53,712 logic cells, 2268 Kbits of performance-enhanced Block RAM (BRAM), and 373 Kbits of distributed RAM that collectively can be configured to optimize a broad range of signal processing requirements.
Flexible, Easy-to-Use XtremeDSP Design Flow & Library
The new 9.1i releases of the Xilinx System Generator for DSP and AccelDSP synthesis software support industry approaches for designing Spartan3A-DSP devices as co-processing engines with digital signal processors or as standalone system platforms. System Generator for DSP is a high-level tool for the design, verification and debug of high-performance DSP systems, including seamless interoperability with Simulink software from The MathWorks, Inc. AccelDSP is a high-level MATLAB language-based tool for designing DSP modules targeting Xilinx devices. Used in conjunction with the Xilinx library of signal processing intellectual property (IP) optimized for both basic and application-specific functions, these tool suites provide a comprehensive DSP development environment that does not require expertise in hardware description languages.
About Xilinx XtremeDSP Solutions
Xilinx is the world’s leading supplier of high-performance reconfigurable DSP solutions optimized for performance, price and power. Xilinx XtremeDSP solutions come complete with silicon platforms, design tools, development boards and kits, reference designs and a host of signal processing IP for wireless and multimedia video applications. The XtremeDSP silicon portfolio delivers maximum flexibility with three device platforms: the Virtex-4 SX platform with over 250 GMACS at 500MHz, Virtex-5 SXT platform for ultra-high bandwidth with over 350 GMACS at 550MHz and integrated low-power serial connectivity, and the Spartan-3A DSP platform with the most price-performance optimized devices offering over 30 GMACS at 250MHz.
EN-Genius says…
Xilinx has made a bold bet by making a large subset of the hard DSP core technology they developed for their high-end Virtex FPGAs available in their value-oriented Spartan series. Because the new XtremeDSP series can give you 20 GMACs worth of configurable processing power for under $30, some existing customers may be able to save lots of money by migrating their high-performance DSP applications from their high-end V4/V5 platforms. But, given the many new applications I’m seeing for signal processing capabilities in high-volume consumer and industrial goods, I think that any erosion Xilinx sees in the sales of their mega-FPGAs will be more than offset by a huge new set of customers who will find all kinds of interesting uses for these handy little devices.
The 5 - 30 GOP capacity of the ExtremeDSP family should hit the sweet spot of the growing need for signal processors that support the increasingly-complex algorithms used for high-volume, cost-conscious applications in the consumer, wireless infrastructure and military/industrial markets. I’m a bit dubious about whether the market for pico/femto-cell basestations that they have set their sights on will actually mature enough to produce the high sales volumes they are hoping for, but there are enough other applications where ExtremeDSP’s abundant supply of signal crunch will be well-received. This includes image processing, consumer and pro video, as well as medical imaging and even some software-defined military radio work.
 The ExtremeDSP family uses an enhanced version of the DSP blocks found in the Virtex series, which includes a hardwired pre-adder to save the chips’ programmable gates and reduce power consumption (see Fig. 1).
The first two DSP-flavored versions of the Spartan line to hit the market will be the 3SD1800A which has 84 DSP slices and 260 kbyte of block RAM, and the 3SD3400A has 126 slices and 373 kbyte of. memory. In an uncharacteristically conservative move,. Xilinx has calculated the device processing capacity based on multiplying the number of DSP48A hardware DSP cores (see Fig. 2) by the clock frequency of the lowest speed grade available for the chip. This gives the 3SD3400A a rating of 30+ GMACs, and 20+ GMACs for the 3SD1800A.
Xilinx was a bit dodgy on providing exact power consumption figures, claiming that it depends heavily on the particular application you’re using the devices in. About the closest to a firm answer I got was that you can expect to save around 30% - 50% of the power used to implement the same function using a vanilla FPGA without the hard DSP cores. Given the relatively high level of technical maturity enjoyed by the Spartan family, I’ll assume that their vague answer reflects the wide range of possibilities that an FPGA can address and not some problems with their alpha silicon that they’d prefer to overlook for the moment.
Xilinx has also imported another important part of the Virtex product line to the Spartan series by creating application-oriented development kits which provide a designer with a highly-functional ready-to-run platform that’s halfway between an evaluation board and a reference design. I’m told we can expect to see kits for video development and general-purpose coprocessor kit for TI DSP acceleration this fall, 2007, with an SDR-flavored (software-defined radio) kit later.
Before these application-oriented systems, Xilinx is releasing a general-purpose DSP development board which lists for around $1100. It has a Xilinx-standard daughter card connector which will be used to add specialized hardware for particular applications. It also has a separate connector which supports the new FMC interface which is emerging as a multi-vendor standard for creating DSP coprocessor mezzanine cards. And although it’s not mentioned in the official pricing and availability below, it’s pretty certain that Xilinx will also introduce a low-cost starter kit (similar to its low-cost Spartan 3 MicroBlaze developer’s kit) featuring the 3SD1800A late this summer, 2007. Bargain-conscious experimenters will appreciate its low list price, rumored to be under $600.
Samples are shipping for the Spartan-3A DSP platform with the 3SD3400A device, and the 3SD1800A device later in Q2 2007. Prices will be $44.95 for the 3SD3400 and $29.85 for the 3SD1800A.
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