Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Altera Europe | Subject: CC-1 Stratix FPGA-based PCI card
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 11 April 2007
DSP product shrinks from eight boards to
one
An audio-systems specialist has used FPGAs to shrink an eight-board, 64 DSP device-based design to a single, Stratix FPGA-based PCI card.
Audio-production systems specialist Fairlight is applying the flexibility and digital signal processing (DSP) advantages of Altera FPGAs to shrink an eight-board, 64 DSP device-based design to a single, Stratix FPGA-based PCI card "Our Crystal Core (CC-1) architecture demonstrates how Altera FPGAs deliver superior price-performance for DSP functions", says Tino Fibaek, Fairlight's Chief Technology Officer
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 Jun 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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"Altera's development tools helped make this project the smoothest engineering effort I have ever witnessed".
"We completed our development in one-third the time it would have taken to complete a DSP device-based architecture".
Crystal Core technology makes obsolete DSP/time-slice bus-based media processing architectures and delivers major performance gains while reducing hardware complexity and cost.
When compared with competitive products, the CC-1 enables significantly improved signal processing quality, broader system capability and previously unattainable price/performance gains.
"This design demonstrates the superior flexibility and the signal processing advantages of FPGAs versus traditional DSP devices", says Dr Nick Tredennick, Editor of Gilder Technology Report.
"The reduced hardware complexity between the new and old systems offers important implementation and time to market advantages".
Fairlight uses the hardware flexibility of Altera FPGAs, rather than the fixed bit-width of DSP devices, to simultaneously run multiple processes at different bit depths.
The company refers to this feature as dynamic resolution optimisation (DRO), which allows audio engineers to choose the best level of processing for each system task.
With DRO, equalisation processing can be performed at 72bit floating-point precision, while mixing is performed with 36bit floating point precision and metering functions at 16bit fixed-point resolution.
This provides greater performance at a lower system cost, resulting in notably enhanced audio quality.
Fairlight applies the FPGA's programmability, enabling a universal hardware platform for a number of media applications requiring real-time audio and video processing power.
For example, the CC-1 deployed for sound design activities can be redeployed as a high-definition (HD) video colour grader and later be repurposed for a music recording session.
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