Telecomms development platform boasts dual DSPs

The SMT8090 is a cutting edge development and experimental platform for wireless and telecommunications markets.

The SMT8090 is a cutting edge development and experimental platform for wireless and telecommunications markets.

The product, the result of Sundance's strong R and D heritage and multidisciplinary engineering group, provides telecommunications designers with a highly integrated solution blending state of the art digital signal processors, field programmable gate arrays and high throughput convertors in a single, compact and integrated environment.

"With the SMT 8090, Sundance is providing wireless and telecommunication system developers a preproduction prototype system platform that gives a unique cost cutting advantages", said Dr Nory Nakhaee CEO of Sundance.

"It helps reduce their development and time window by allowing them to immediately and rapidly test their 3G wireless designs without fumbling through long learning curves", concluded Nakhaee.

The SMT8090 is an integration feat where two daughtercards (SMT338-VP and SMT390) are sandwiched together on a carrier board that ensures PCI connectivity.

For signal, and reconfigurable processing, the system integrates two floating-point Texas Instruments TMS320C6713 processors running at 225MHz harmonised in a balanced architecture with a powerful Xilinx Virtex-II Pro (2VP30) FPGA that integrates two IBM 400MHz PowerPC processors and eight 3.125Gbit/s full-duplex serial transceivers.

"Sundance research engineers have truly taken a bold approach and have managed to maximise the unique features provided by the Virtex-II Pro FPGA for data acquisition platform development", said Jerry Banks, Director of DSP Marketing at Xilinx.

"The SMT8090 clearly demonstrates that Xilinx high-performance FPGAs are well suited not only for embedded control but for data acquisition systems as well".

Supported by 256Mbyte of SDRAM for the DSP and 128Mbyte for the FPGA the SMT8090 sports an 8Mbyte Flash ROM for boot code FPGA configuration and "stand-alone" application, and I/Os are articulated around two high-speed and high-bandwidth Sundance high-speed buses (SHB).

Leveraging LVDS signals built into the Virtex-II Pro FPGA, Sundance has developed a novel interface approach that separates control functions from noise-sensitive digital acquisition semiconductors.

Two 12bit, high-speed analogue to digital convertors sampling up to 210MHz are integrated on the daughterboards, and are optimised for dynamic performance in wide and broadband systems.

"The SMT 8090 is a complete environment merged in a single homogenous device where you get the most advanced logic, highest performance, density, memory and Texas Instruments' cutting edge processing power", said Pierre Popovic, President of Cadre Codesign Technologies.

"Our OEMs and customers continue to turn to us for embedded platforms that deliver leading edge technology, that can be used in many telecommunication applications and don't cost a fortune to own", added Popovic.

The SMT8090 was designed to meet the needs of OEMs who are looking long lasting, flexible and well integrated development platform to be used in a variety of embedded communication applications.

Sundance has carefully chosen its processing components and architecture, ensuring that OEMs can cost effectively leverage the SMT8090 flexibility in more than one implementation.

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