ACADEMIA

Nallatech has announced four new COTS FPGA products that combine the processing and I/O performance of Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs with enhancements to Nallatech's DIME-II architecture including host interface improvements and enhanced clocking. These products extend performance density for customers demanding the full capabilities of Virtex-4 in high performance embedded computing applications including surveillance and reconnaissance, software defined radio and signal intelligence. Nallatech's announcement includes the BenNUEY-PCI-X, a PCI-X DIME-II motherboard with on-board Virtex-4 FX FPGA and three DIME-II expansion sites. Three additional FPGA computing modules complete the new product set: -- BenBLUE-V4 dual-FPGA processing engine; -- BenDATA-V4 mixed memory and digital I/O module; and -- BenADC-V4 ultra-high-speed analogue capture module. Nallatech's new COTS FPGA products are available with the Virtex-4 LX FPGAs with high performance logic capability or the Virtex-4 SX family optimized for DSP performance. These configurations allow developers to optimize FPGA hardware resources to meet their precise requirements across a diverse number of applications and build systems that meet needs for scalability and performance. By identifying the full capabilities of Virtex-4 in the product design stage, Nallatech has been able to ensure its customers can easily access all the features and performance of the FPGA architecture. Fully integrated hardware and software support for all platforms of the Virtex-4 family enhance performance in the whole application and provide ease of design for customers. Nallatech's Virtex-4 products support industry standard form factors, including cPCI, VME, PCI and PCI-104, delivering up to eight Virtex-4 FPGAs on a single COTS FPGA computing platform. "These new Virtex-4 solutions are a significant milestone in Nallatech's product development that enable developers to use the full potential of the Xilinx Virtex-4 architecture with our hardware, software and design tools," said Malachy Devlin, Senior V.P. and CTO of Nallatech. "As a Xilinx Alliance Program Partner, Nallatech was able to combine critical enhancements during our engineering to the DIME-II architecture with attention to the latest industry standards/form factors and extended hardware and software support." The BenNUEY-PCI-X is the third generation of the BenNUEY series of PCI cards and the first to offer the 1Gbyte host bandwidth of the PCI-X bus. An on-board Virtex-4 FX60 or FX100 provides the ideal balance of programmable resources for processing and system management, while three DIME-II expansion slots allow users to optimize system resources to meet processing, memory and I/O requirements. The BenBLUE-V4 features dual Virtex-4 LX100 or LX160 FPGAs, 64 Mbyte DDR2 SRAM, implemented on an enhanced DIME-II architecture. The BenDATA-V4 features a Virtex-4 LX or SX with 16 Mbytes DDR2 SRAM and 1 Gbyte DDR-II SDRAM. By using the latest DDR2 SRAM and DDR-II SDRAM, Nallatech's new memory subsystems increase bandwidth by more than 275% compared to previous modules using technologies such as ZBT SRAM. This allows system designers to satisfy higher processing demands, use fewer processing modules, reduce hardware dimensions and simplify integration. The BenADC-V4 ultra-high-speed analog capture module combines the Virtex-4 SX or LX and 16 Mbytes DDR2 SRAM with four independent analog inputs feeding four 12-bit 250 MSPS ADC channels. This will allow developers to capture, digitize, analyze and manipulate multi-channel or complex signals in real time using lightweight, low-footprint hardware with lower overall power requirements than DSP farms or other large multi-processor arrays. "The Virtex-4 architecture has tremendous I/O and processing capability, that will outstrip peripherals that cannot satisfy demands of many of today's HPEC applications," said Craig Sanderson, product manager at Nallatech. "Nallatech focused on creating peripheral subsystems to match the performance of the Virtex-4 family, in addition to maximizing parameters such as memory bandwidth, thereby delivering the highest returns for customers investing in Virtex-4 platforms." Pricing and availability: The four Virtex-4 COTS FPGA products will be available for shipping Q1 2006; pricing is available on request. Please contact your local sales representative at 877-44-NALLA or visit its Web site.