ESL design tools speed processor development

Accelerated computing specialist AppServer Solutions has developed a high-performance multicontext real-time hyperspectral imaging movie processor.

Accelerated computing specialist AppServer Solutions has developed a high-performance multicontext real-time hyperspectral imaging (HSI) movie processor.

By using Celoxica's DK Design Suite of ESL design tools and RC300 Series FPGA platform, engineers at AppServer Solutions reduced development time by some 70% and completed the project in less than one month.

HSI is used in defence and civilian remote sensing tasks such as chemical and biological weapons detection, underground bomb-damage assessment, foliage penetration, mineral exploration and environmental monitoring.

Already deployed into the defence sector the HSI system developed by AppServer collects and interprets detailed spectral information from a scene.

The spectral range includes infra-red, visible and ultra-violet light: typically with wavelengths of 300-2000nm.

The resulting images are called hyperspectral cubes which are then clustered into representative groups or components.

This operation is called hyperspectral classification and allows the users to remotely identify otherwise undetectable features such as particular crops, geological structures or hidden armaments.

Using just a single FPGA-based hyperspectral processor, the AppHyperTracker system can parallel process more than 15 x 100Mbyte hyperspectral cubes per second from multiple sensors in real time.

Celoxica's ESL environment allows users to explicitly specify parallelisation at all needed levels of granularity.

According to Dr Marina Murzina, AppServer's Chief Technology Officer, this is a significant advantage over the machine-automated parallelisation provided by other high-level programming tools.

Since automated parallelisation cannot possibly allow for all the optimisations needed in very high performance HSI.

"Celoxica's DK Design Suite frees the user from exhausting RTL programming effort", Murzina said.

"As a result, it took us only three weeks to implement highly efficient parallel Hyperspectral algorithms on the RC300 board".

"This includes real-time video output".

AppServer Solutions uses Celoxica C-based design and synthesis tools to optimise complex digital image and signal processing algorithms and synthesise them directly to FPGA hardware.

Celoxica's design tools provide direct integration with FPGA vendor place and route.

AppServer engineers used Celoxica's Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL) open-API to develop their applications and IP to a single set of interfaces and independent of board level detail.

"PAL provided us with a comprehensive set of tools and examples for using the RC300 board's hardware, such as onboard SRAM and DDR, video output, audio input and output, and Ethernet", said the CEO of Appserver Solutions, Alan Prouse.

"This allowed us to concentrate on algorithms and the high-level design of the application".

"With the DK Design Suite, our FPGA customers have access to the industry's benchmark ESL design solutions", said Jeff Jussel, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Celoxica.

"AppServer's aggressive time to market and product development achievements demonstrate what is possible when you combine engineering talent with ESL and FPGA".

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