Reconfigurable High Performance Systems

Systems often need to be reconfigurable; maybe so that a single system can perform many different tasks, perhaps to support future upgrades and enhancements. With Millions of FPGA gates and I/Os at 100s of Mhz, HERON systems are programmable, providing flexibility to do what you want.

HUNT ENGINEERING doesn't program the systems - you (our customer) do that. However it should not be necessary for you to start the development of your program from the very low hardware level. At HUNT we see it as our job to provide you with the tools, APIs and libraries that you need in order to concentrate on developing the part of the system that is unique to your application. You should definitely not be expected to re-create low-level software that every customer would need (regardless of their application). That low-level software is better written by the engineer who designed and developed the hardware. That is the way we work at HUNT - the hardware designer provides the low-level software to enable you to use that hardware efficiently without needing to know the details. 

For FPGA modules we provide template VHDL projects that define all of the pinout, signal standards and timings you need to access the hardware from the FPGA. We also provide the Hardware Interface layer VHDL to access  HERON-FIFOs using dedicated FPGA hardware.

For the Host (PC) we provide the Host-API software to access  HERON-FIFOs using the master mode hardware of the module carrier card combined with the correct driver model for various PC operating systems.

A HEART module carrier allows you to use those FIFOs to make real time 400Mbyte/second connections between modules.

Reconfigurable architecture for your system
FIFO connections are configured by software using the HERON Serial Bus. You define the connections you need in a simple text file, the HeartConf utility we provide does the rest.

If your reconfigurable system is to be used standalone or embedded you program your programs into PROMS so that the system can boot following a reset.

Learn more about reconfigurable systems from Hunt