Product category: Networking Hardware
News Release from: SBS Technologies | Subject: FPGA-based SBCs
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 24 December 2003
Tools speed high bandwidth development
FPGA technology has come a long way, says Ron Strauss, Vice President and General Manager, SBS Technologies.
Today, field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology has evolved to the point that FPGA chips can do much more than serve as a front end to I/O devices FPGAs can now handle the bulk of the processing in high-bandwidth and compute-intensive applications
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Aug 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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These recent advances allow embedded developers to deliver FPGA-based systems with an order of magnitude better price/performance ratio over existing multi-CPU or DSP systems.
Because of these cost/performance benefits, FPGAs are now being used for applications that are algorithm-intensive and require high bandwidth, such as medical imaging, numerous industrial applications, and sonar and radar for the military.
FPGA computing is an emerging technology, and much like the early days of embedded CPUs and DSPs, software tools are quickly maturing to simplify the development cycle for FPGA-based imaging applications.
As a result of these ease-of-use tools, FPGA computing is becoming an accepted alternative for high bandwidth and CPU intensive applications.
With the right development tools and software infrastructure to isolate the hardware layer of a conventional FPGA development environment, software programmers can leverage the advantages of new FPGA systems.
Today's tools ease development from infrastructure software that already "understands" the hardware to block level and C language software tools that enable quick links among user algorithms, internal soft-buses within the FPGA, and the resources of target hardware.
With the latest tools developers can accelerate the time-to-market for FPGA-based imaging applications in commercial, industrial, and military applications.
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