Looking for a "standard" embedded DSP/FPGA platform/bus

Hello,

The company I work for is used to making its own custom boards (mainly FPGA-centric) but this is time consuming and expensive, so we're looking at moving more and more to COTS.

Ideally, we would like to use a standard interconnect bus so that we can mix and match cards from different manufacturers to assemble a complete system, and possibly build our own expansion cards if necessary. There seems to be lots of competing standards: PC104, PC104+, Compact PCI, VME, PMC, PXI, etc. The problem I see with this approach is that it seems that all these systems are CPU-centric, requiring a central CPU running some OS. Since we are embedded guys, this may be a problem, as we are more used to program microcontrollers, DSP and FPGAs than Linux drivers.

The other option is to go with a single signal processing company and their propriatary bus (i.e. Nallatech and DIME modules, Sundance Local Bus, Traquair micro-line family, Hunt Engineering HERON, etc). This option seems more natural to us but unfortunately we couldn't mix boards from different vendors, so the choice would be much more limited.

Just to give a little more information, I'll list our current requirements for one particular project (although we would like the chosen architecture/bus to be as flexible as possible for future projects):

- 1x DSP processor (speed is not too important right now, but the higher the better to be future-proof)

- 2x =B110V ADC input (very low frequency, 150 Hz)

- 2x =B110V DAC output (very low frequency, 150 Hz)

- Several GPIOs, say 16

- 8x RS-232 ports

- 16 analog inputs multiplexed to one ADC (could also be one ADC with

4 GPIO to control an external mux).

- 1x Ethernet port (nice-to-have but not absolutely necessary)

These requirements are quite low-end in terms of throughput but we also have a project where we do data processing at 320 Mbytes/s. I'm not hoping for an architecture that can do both but I just wanted to point out that we're not only doing 150 Hz data processing ;)

One last thing is that we would like the whole system to be as plug- and-play as possible (software-wise). We would like to focus on our application instead of wasting time making all the boards talk to each other.

Can anyone share their experience or give any advice about which way we should go?

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance!

Patrick

Reply to
Patrick Dubois
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My experience is the opposite; the universal solutions are expensive and overcomplicated; you are adding the problems of somebody else to your own problems.

The real question is what goals are you trying to accomplish.

Sounds like a custom board with BlackFin-537 CPU. One week to do the hardware, one month to do the software.

It depends. What exactly are you doing at 320M/s?

Then what is your point?

Is the socket programming too much work?

My experience is that the universal solutions don't work, and the modular approach doesn't work too. If the goal is the particular application or the range of applications, then the best way is to be application specific.

Vladimir Vassilevsky DSP and Mixed Signal Consultant

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Reply to
Vladimir Vassilevsky

Le Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:31:44 -0600, Vladimir Vassilevsky a écrit:

Hey Vladimir you're late. Purchase the hardware and 1 month minus a week to do the software.

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HBV
Reply to
Habib Bouaziz-Viallet

I'd really like to see such a board done in one week. Schematics alone would take more than that (especially if you're using new parts). I'm not too familar with DSPs but for FPGAs, documentation is several hundred pages long and you would be foolish to design a board without reading it all, it's full of tricky gotchas. Now add the layout time to that and you are WELL over one week. Maybe one week if you've designed tens of similar boards but not too many people are in this situation.

Real-time data processing for a Fourier transform imaging spectrometer, but that's not the point. This is probably always going to be custom boards.

My point is that we span a large spectrum of data processing requirements, so idealy the chosen solution would be flexible. Like cPCI for example might work. There is a large variety of boards available, including beasts with multiple FPGAs and DSPs. We would like to have that option later on.

It depends, our inexperience is the problem. Say we want to create our own custom board for our chosen modular architecture (which will likely happen), I'd like the integration to be as easy as possible on the software side. The easiest would be memory mapped IO in a DSP for example, and the hardest (for me anyway) would be writing the necessary driver in Linux or Windows if we go the embedded-PC way.

The goal is to save time and money. Maybe COTS is not the option but we are willing to give it a shot. I believe that the key will be to find the _right_ modular approach and even more importantly, the right vendor with good support.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Patrick

Reply to
Patrick Dubois

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