Single 7-by-7-inch board packs an integrated DSP

BittWare Inc. describes its Tiburon as a complete DSP system that packs a host PC and peripherals, general-purpose DSPs, and real-time I/O on a 7-by-7-inch (177.8-by-177.8mm) board.

The Tiburon's host PC is a 266MHz Geode SC2200 from National Semiconductor Corp. Geode peripherals include Ethernet, VGA and TFT interfaces, dual USB ports, dual RS-232 ports, and an IDE connector. Memory available to the host includes 128MB of SDRAM, a socketed BIOS Flash, and an on-board CompactFlash/MicroDrive.

Providing the real-time signal processing are four 100MHz Analog Devices ADSP-21161 Sharc DSPs, which deliver a total of 2,400Mflops. The DSPs are clustered to a 50MHz processor bus that also connects a 64MB bank of SDRAM, 8MB of Flash, and 512KB of synchronous-burst SRAM.

BittWare's Sharc-FIN ASIC provides the 32-bit, 33MHz PCI interface to link the Geode host PC to the DSPs. It also provides bus interfaces and peripherals for the ADSP-21161 quartet.

Real-time I/O interfaces make the unit adaptable for many applications, the company said. One channel of high-speed, 14-bit ADC (65MHz) and DAC (100MHz) interfaces analog signals to the DSPs, along with four channels of general-purpose, 12-bit, 50kHz ADC, and DAC.

A Spartan-II FPGA from Xilinx Inc. provides reconfigurable, high-performance I/O control and processing to interface the external signals to the DSPs via the Sharc link port core or the 32-bit processor bus. It also provides 32 bits of digital I/O.

Tiburon features an industry-standard PMC interface with BittWare's PMC+ extensions. It is compatible with standard PMC modules.

BittWare offers a set of software development tools for the Tiburon, as well as a developer's kit that includes a 1GB MicroDrive with the software preinstalled. The Tiburon is available now, starting at $1,495 in OEM quantities.

EE Times