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I'M A TRAVELING MAN

by Tom Cantrell

Start ı Key to the I-Way ı Itıs a Small World After All ı Sources and PDF

Itıs that time again. Summer is in full swing, and the designerıs fancy turns to a calendar of conferences, trade shows, and other soirees that mark the season.

It can be a rough life on the show circuit. Traffic and parking hassles, endless meetings, and pressrooms with no coffee (what are they thinking?). Nevertheless, itıs still a rejuvenating ritual to make the rounds and discover the latest crop of goodies. Fortunately, when it comes to the March of Silicon, every year is a wonder year.

FUN WITH FPGAs

Itıs no secret that FPGAs are a hot item. Far beyond mere rocket science and one-off or prototyping applications, donıt be surprised to see FPGAs encroaching on both ASIC (i.e., gate arrays) and standard merchant market IC sockets (such as MCUs, DSPs, and peripheral controllers).

The folks at Xilinx have been pushing their new Virtex parts with a passion, somewhat successfully judging by the emergence of third-party evaluation kits and development tools.

On the top of my two-foot stack of press kits I find Wildcard from Annapolis Micro Systems (see Photo 1). If this little puppy doesnıt get your engineering juices flowing, youıre either dead or should consider changing careers.

Photo 1ıThe Wildcard from Annapolis Micro Systems puts a big chip (Xilinx XCV300) in a small package.

Wildcard crams a high horsepower Xilinx Virtex XCV300 (300k+ gates, 300+ pins, and 64 Kb of RAM) into a single height Type II PC Card slot. Just the thing for road warriors who do their FPGA designing on the run.

Thanks to a 32-bit 33-MHz CardBus (i.e., PCI) and 512-KB on-card RAM (dual 32-bit wide RAM arrays), the Wildcard can also work as a special-purpose accelerator add-on for laptops and portables. Applications that come to mind include signal and image processing, encryption/decryption, data acquisition, waveform generation, and so on.

Another XCV300-based design (see Figure 1) comes from a seemingly unlikely source, Avnet Inc. After all, distributors are useful for kitting orders, programming OTPs, and such, but since when is Avnet in the business of selling development tools under its own label?

Figure 1ıWhen it comes to FPGA development tools, who you gonna call? Avnet offers their own PC plug-in Virtex development system.

In fact, FPGAs and distributors are a match made in heaven. By contrast, despite a number of attempts, distributors have not managed to grab a piece of the ASIC action. I suspect theyıll find FPGAs a much better fit with the mass market they serve. And, what better way to get in line for a chip PO down the road than by supplying tools up front?

Until now, XESS Inc. has been best known for entry-level kits, combining inexpensive $100ı$200 evaluation modules and a book (The Practical Xilinx Designer Lab Book) that is chock full of examples and exercises written by the company founder, Dave Vanden Bout.

Now going upscale, in addition to a Virtex FPGA, XESSıs new XSV board (see Photo 2) packs a lot of distinctly PC-like punch, including video, audio, Ethernet, USB, and so on. Versions are available with 50k, 100k, and 300k gate FPGAs (i.e., XCV50, 100, and 300 chips) for $699, $749, and $899, respectively.

Photo 2ıRoll your own computer with the XSV board from XESS.

Remember the good-old days before PCs and Macs when hard-core engineers built their own computers from scratch? The XESS board seems like a perfect way to relive those heady times, and you donıt even have to know how to solder.

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