Workshops show off 32bit design capabilities

This week at Embedded World 2005 Altium will explain its approach to 32-bit system development on FPGAs through a series of interactive workshops.

This week at Embedded World 2005 Altium will explain its approach to 32bit system development on FPGAs through a series of interactive workshops.

Engineers can participate in free hands-on sessions that illustrate how Nexar, Altium's FPGA-based system design software, is moving embedded development on reprogrammable hardware into the mainstream.

Nexar greatly simplifies the development of 32bit systems targeted for FPGA implementation, and takes out the risk of migrating systems to the 32bit domain.

The component-based design methodology coupled with interactive debugging of both hardware and software means little or no HDL/RTL expertise is required to build a system on an FPGA, opening up the benefits of FPGA-hosted embedded system design to a much wider market than previously thought possible.

"During the workshops, participants will learn of the enormous advantages of working in a reconfigurable hardware domain", said Nick Martin, founder and Joint CEO, Altium.

"By applying our interactive LiveDesign methodology to the development of sophisticated 32bit systems implemented inside FPGAs, engineers will realise significant benefits to design time and ease of system development and implementation".

Altium's presentations, to be held at 1000, 1200 and 1400 local time, from Tuesday 22nd to Thursday 24th February, will also showcase TSK3000, the company's newly released FPGA device-independent 32bit RISC processor, which is included with the Nexar design system.

TSK3000 has been specifically designed to minimise the complications and complexity usually associated with 32bit system design across all FPGA chips.

The RISC processor is internally based on the Harvard architecture but features a simple memory structure and configurable hardware-based vectored interrupt handling to make coding simpler.

Interfacing to the processor is also simplified by the provision of separate Wishbone bus interfaces for connecting memories and peripherals.

As with all Nexar processors and FPGA-based components, TSK3000 is supplied presynthesised for a wide variety of FPGAs.

This means the FPGA can be easily incorporated into a system design at the block level, eliminating the need to manually instantiate the core in HDL and greatly simplifying the processor's use in FPGA-based systems.

"The MP3 player example to be detailed in the presentations clearly demonstrates Nexar's 32bit design capabilities", commented Martin.

"The example highlights the speed and ease with which application hardware can be developed and implemented on an FPGA platform".

Altium's design system fully integrates software development with the hardware design, with full tool chain support for the TSK3000.

This includes a highly optimising compiler based on Altium's Viper compiler technology that provides compact, fast code.

The system also supports full source-level debugging directly on the target hardware.

The device-independent nature of the TSK3000 and the recent release of a number of new high-end daughter boards for the NanoBoard means system designers can use Nexar to take full advantage of the latest developments in FPGA device technology to rapidly develop and deploy high-performance 32bit systems running within a programmable device.

The TSK3000 processor and associated software development support is included as a standard part of the Nexar design system.

Nexar is priced at Eur 7995 for a new licence.

A Unified Nexar-Protel 2004 software license is also available, providing complete FPGA-PCB systems development, and is priced at Eur 9995.

Protel 2004 users can upgrade their existing licence to this system from Eur 2995.

Altium's NanoBoard is priced at Eur 995 and is currently delivered with two daughterboards included - the Xilinx Spartan-IIE 300 and the Altera Cyclone 12.

A wide range of additional daughterboards are also available.

For developers wanting to evaluate Nexar, LiveDesign Evaluation Kits are now available and prices start from Eur 49.

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