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News Release from: 4DSP | Subject: FFT core
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 30 May 2005
FFT core makes the most of new FPGAs
A new IEEE754 compliant floating point fast Fourier transform core is designed for use with the latest generations of high performance programmable devices from vendors like Xilinx and Altera.
4DSP has developed a new IEEE754 compliant floating point fast Fourier transform core for use with the latest generations of high performance programmable devices from vendors like Xilinx and Altera The FFT core performs transforms on complex data ranging from 256 to 1M points with external memory if necessary, such as QDR SRAM, closely coupled to the internal logic of the FPGA
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 24 Apr 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Based on a radix-32 architecture it allows users to change the transform length on-the-fly, without having to reconfigure the programmable device.
The flexibility engineered into its design makes this FFT core an ideal component for systems that may change mission rapidly in their application design or for systems whose algorithms are complex in nature or may require flexibility in mission assignment.
"We did not expect to reach this level of performance in an FPGA", says Pierrick Vulliez, 4DSP's CTO.
"This has typically been done in an ASIC, which is increasingly more expensive to develop and requires a specific board architecture".
"To produce a flexible and lower cost device, that is capable of performing a 1024 point floating point FFT in 11.4us using a single core, is far beyond our original expectations".
"For example, when applied to video 2D transforms with 1024 x 1024 images, a single core can process 42 frames per second".
The latest advances in FPGA gate densities, combined with efficient, tightly written VHDL cores, allow multiple cores to coexist inside a single FPGA device.
In new chips like the Altera Stratix-II and Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs, four cores can be implemented in parallel, offering a double-digit acceleration factor compared with currently available floating-point DSP devices.
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