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HERON FPGA Modules with Virtex® II Pro - FPGA with on chip PowerPC® processor
HERON-FPGA modules use reprogrammable Xilinx FPGAs. The Virtex®-II Pro adds PowerPC® functionality to the range of
HERON modules
that can be used to provide your system requirements. You can combine
as many modules as you need to get the right features - the modules can exchange
data at up to 400Mbytes/second in each direction using FIFO connections!
Our Virtex®-II Pro module adds off chip DDR memory accessed at 200MHz and I/O options at 100s of Mhz and you can put together systems with almost limitless capabilities!
The Virtex FPGAs that we use have thousands of Configurable Logic Blocks, which can be linked together to form any logic function you choose. Embedded in the FPGA fabric of a Virtex®-II Pro is a PowerPC processor that can be directly linked to the on chip Block RAM, off chip RAM and peripherals and the FPGA logic. We use FPGA logic to interface HERON FIFOs directly to the Block RAMs that the PowerPC® uses as on chip memory.
Just like our Virtex®-II modules the FPGA configuration developed in VHDL, is normally downloaded using the HERON Serial Bus, but after development is complete embedded systems can use on board PROMs to configure the FPGAs on power up. In addition to that you can program the PowerPC® using industry standard C and C++ compilers. The compiled code can be stored in the on module FLASH memory, or downloaded from your PC using our Server/Loader tool. We provide a tutorial to show you how to use the PowerPC® on a HERON FPGA that has a Virtex®-II Pro device.
Users of the Virtex®-II Pro will need to have a VHDL synthesiser tool such as Xilinx ISE®, and also the Xilinx Embedded Developers Kit (EDK®). Combined with the HUNT ENGINEERING software tools that you receive with your system, these are all the development tools you will need for your system.
Along with many example projects we provide the Hardware Interface Layer which allows you to access the module hardware with guaranteed signal timing and logic - leaving you free to concentrate on your application VHDL. We give you lots of VHDL to use in your system - functions like Camera Link™, FPDP, Digital Down Converters, Image Processing functions etc.
ExtremeDSP™ from Xilinx makes a lot of signal processing functionality available to the developer. Blocks like Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), Direct Digital Synthesisers (DDS) and even FIR filters are supplied as standard with the Xilinx tools. We supply several worked examples of such functions that can be used as demonstrations of using FPGAs but can also be useful starting points for the development of your project.
See also our HERON
modules with Virtex®-4, HERON-FPGA and HERON-IO
modules with Virtex®-II FPGA plus other options
We are continuously developing new modules using the latest FPGA technology.
| Modules with FPGA and memory |  |
| HERON-FPGA9 | Virtex® II-Pro XC2VP7 FPGA with PowerPC and 256 Mbytes DDR SDRAM | FIFOS access at 400Mbytes/sec in and 400Mbytes/sec out at the same time. Memory access at 3.2Gbyte/second |
30 digital I/Os and USB |
