Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Celoxica
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 12 September 2002
Team attacks application specific server
market
A new joint development team aims to create powerful, flexible and scaleable application specific servers.
A new joint development team aims to create powerful, flexible and scaleable application specific servers Celoxica, Motorola and StrongBow Technologies are working together to create servers that embed applications, such as transaction processing for credit cards, directly in hardware
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 6 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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FPGAs updated over the web
Celoxica has announced the DK1 design suite, software that enables a fundamentally new approach to the design of electronic hardware.
Celoxica offers a free go at FPGA design
Celoxica DK1 Eval is a free evaluation version of the Celoxica DK1 design suite that is restricted to compilations for simulation only, with no EDIF or VHDL output capability.
StrongBow's modular server technology is designed around Motorola Computer Group's MXP platform and the proposed PICMG 2.20 standard for a high-speed serial mesh interconnect.
The platform carries boards with multiple Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs, for massively parallel hardware implementation of applications, which are programmed using Celoxica's DK1 design suite.
Customers can quickly and confidently design, implement and manage business critical applications.
Further reading
Design suite extended to latest FPGAs
Celoxica has extended its DK1 design suite for the rapid design of reconfigurable hardware to support Xilinx Virtex II customers.
Board helps with small to medium FPGA prototyping
New from Celoxica, the RC100 stand-alone development board provides a rapid prototyping platform for small- to medium-sized FPGA designs.
PAL simplifies FPGA application interfacing
Celoxica has announced its platform abstraction layer (PAL) strategy for FPGA and system independent reconfigurable designs.
"Without Celoxica's tools, this would not have been possible", said Alan Prouse, CEO and founder of StrongBow Technologies.
"With DK1.1 we are able to take the algorithm that is the heart of the application, and express it directly in FPGA hardware.
Users do not need CPUs, operating systems and associated overheads to run their applications.
Instead they gain a massive increase in throughput, in excess of two orders of magnitude, while preserving all the relevant aspects of their legacy software".
"An added bonus is that the servers use off the shelf, state-of-the-art technologies.
By using high-performance Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs and the Motorola platform, we are able to scale to meet increased demand, both by adding extra chassis, and by using later generations of FPGAs".
The MXP platform was chosen for its flexible, scalable backplane architecture and carrier grade features that are a necessity in next generation high-end server applications.
In addition to the FPGA boards, the platform carries communications cards to connect to clients, either directly, across communications network or through the internet, and to storage systems.
Protocols, such as the TCP/IP stack, and security measures, such as SSL, are implemented directly in hardware using DK1.1.
On a single programmable platform chip, the Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGA integrates fully embedded systems components, hard and soft IP and millions of gates of customisable logic.
Virtex-II Pro offers hard IBM PowerPC 405 processor cores, custom IP generation, multigigabit serial transceivers and up to 10Mbit of onboard RAM.
This rich set of features supports a wide range of applications by providing a very high level of flexibility to system designers.
The Virtex-II Pro architecture is ideal for the modular application server, which requires high speed serial communication between chips and the ability to efficiently implement a wide variety of complex applications and algorithms in hardware.
"Xilinx is delighted to be associated with the new StrongBow project", said Robert Bielby, senior director of Strategic Solutions Marketing for Xilinx.
"It is a valid endorsement of the power and performance of the Virtex-II Pro and the concept of the platform FPGA".
"We are excited about providing StrongBow with a comprehensive design methodology for taking their complex algorithms from C to FPGA", said Phil Bishop, CEO of Celoxica.
"The complexity of their system is a true testament to our capacity as an FPGA design solution supplier for algorithmic implementation in the embedded system design space".
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