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by jason mcdonald, senior editor | read other blog posts

FPGAs are a major focus of embedded systems, these days, and recently there has been a lot of great news from the FPGA community. Moreover, vendors - both large and small - are making it easier than ever to deploy FPGAs in your next design. Some, like Avnet, Analog Devices, and Xilinx, are even providing low cost 'development boards' that often are accompanied by real-world training. Here are the top news highlights for FPGA design.

contents of this post:

1. fpga news: news roundup - xilinx, altera, and more!
2. fmc: the fmc mezzanine modules mature
3. fpga books: book list
4. feedback - read it
5. feedback - give it

fpga news: news roundup - xilinx, altera, and more!

What's new in FPGAs? First of all, the big two, Xilinx and Altera , continue to churn out an amazing volume of news and news announcements - new FPGAs that offer better price / performance than ever. But beyond the producers of FPGAs there is an entire ecosystem of smaller vendors, focused especially on tools and boards. With respect to tools, one vendor that has made a notable effort to reduce the cost of high-quality FPGA tools is Aldec. They recently announced a Low-cost Linux RTL and Gate-level Simulator, a new configuration that supports both Linux and Windows® mixed-language VHDL/Verilog® simulation. Riviera-PRO™ LV is a multi-platform RTL and gate-level simulator that supports, IEEE VHDL, Verilog® and SystemVerilog (Design) IEEE standard, Xilinx SecureIP and VHDL/Verilog IP encryption. This builds on their July announcement of a new low-cost mixed language RTL simulator -- Active-HDL™ Designer Edition. That product closes a gap in the mixed RTL FPGA simulation market by going for the 'middle ground' between the very high end and low end of RTL simulators. You can find out more about Aldec, here .

On the board / module front, one vendor to watch is CommAgility. This company is a manufacturer of signal processing AMC modules for wireless baseband applications, combining flexible antenna interfaces, the latest TI DSPs and Xilinx FPGAs, and high bandwidth on and off-card communications using Serial RapidIO and Ethernet. Their recent news is a FPGA processing AdvancedMC module with PCI Express interface, which includes a high-speed PCI Express interface and a Xilinx® Virtex®-5 FPGA. The new module’s combination of high processing power and flexible I/O makes it well-suited for many industrial, scientific and telecoms applications. The company focuses on AMC modules, and similarly announced their AMC-V5F-10G, a high performance FPGA-based interface and processing card for the latest wireless baseband and other demanding processing and optical data interfacing applications. They are an example of the growing field of vendors that take FPGAs and implement them on boards - thereby reducing your FPGA design need by doing the difficult FPGA / board integration process for you. More about CommAgility, here .

fmc: the fmc mezzanine modules mature

One of the interesting standards to watch is the FPGA Mezzanine Card, or FMC, as defined in VITA 57 provides a specification describing a new I/O mezzanine module. The module will connect to, but not be limited to, 3U and 6U form factor cards. FMC modules use a smaller form factor compared with PMC or XMC modules, and assume connection to an FPGA or other device with reconfigurable I/O capability. (Source: http://www.vita.com/fmc.html ). This standard is beginning to find some major traction and support from significant vendors like Xilinx, Avnet, and Analog Devices.

All are seeding the market with low cost development kits based on the FMC standard. Xilinx, for example, announced that they had 'simplified' serial digital interface development for high performance professional broadcast audio and video systems, and produced a new kit that integrates a Virtex-6 LX240T device on the ML605 evaluation board, an industry-standard FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC), supporting digital audio and video interfaces and bridging technologies, complete ISE® Design Suite Logic Edition software development environment. The design target is SDI interfaces based on Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) standards, including triple rate SDI transmit, receive, and pass-through designs. You can find out more about the kit, here .

Avnet and Analog Devices are working together on FMCs as well. Their new kit is called the Analog Devices BF518F FMC Development Kit, designed by and available exclusively from Avnet Electronics Marketing, provides a simple-to-use platform for hardware and software engineers designing with the Analog Devices BF518F low-power Blackfin® processor and the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework. The board can operate either as a standalone, or as an FMC Mezzanine Module connected to any VITA 57.1-compliant carrier board. By providing a convenient development platform for applications that combine FPGAs and embedded processors with advanced networking capability, it has never been easier to include signal processing in your next design. Details, here .

fpga books: book list

Beyond the FPGA websites, news, and tutorials indexed by eg3.com in our FPGA content at http://www.eg3.com/fpga.htm , you can also look for new books on FPGA. Here are three new books that approach FPGAs at a tutorial level -

• FPGAs 101: Everything you need to know to get started - FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) can be found in applications such as smart phones, mp3 players, medical imaging devices, and for aerospace and defense technology. FPGAs consist of logic blocks and programmable interconnects. This allows an engineer to start with a blank slate and program the FPGA for a specific task, for instance, digital signal processing, or a specific device, for example, a software-defined radio. Due to the short...

• Embedded System Design: Algorithms Acceleration by a Reconfigurable Computing Platform of FPGAs - This book offers an efficient embedded system architecture design in the study of algorithm acceleration by the reconfigurable computing platform of FPGAs. Embedded system design has become very complex recently. The large computational need of multiple applications on the same chip and the tremendous parallel processing capability of the reconfigurable FPGA platform have motivated our research work to find the best application configuration...

• FPGA-Based System Design - Digital designs once built in custom silicon are increasingly implemented in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Effective FPGA system design requires a strong understanding of VLSI issues and constraints, and an understanding of the latest FPGA-specific techniques. In this book, Princeton University's Wayne Wolf covers everything FPGA designers need to know about all these topics: both the "how" and the "why."

All these books are new, in the last six months, and you can find more books as well at our FPGA coverage on eg3.com. Now is the time to be learning about FPGA and taking advantage of the many vendors that are making FPGAs easier than ever - whether through great tools or through great boards.

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