Advantech's New COM-Express with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor

Advantech has released its newest System On Module (SOM): SOM-5782. The SOM-5782 is an embedded PCI Express CPU module powered by the latest Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processors. As well as offering PCI Express x16 support, it provides a special heat spreader solution that reduces thermal design effort. Click to learn more!

Board vendors hope to make FPGA design easy by providing prototyping, and ultimately production boards, for FPGAs. A case in point is the new V5+C from VMETRO and Impulse Accelerated Technologies focused on rapid prototyping and algorithm development. The kit, which includes the latest-generation Impulse C-to-VHDL compiler tools and a VMETRO PMC module based on the Xilinx Virtex™-5 FPGA, allows military and industrial system developers to hardware–accelerate DSP algorithms and quickly prototype on FPGA within an ANSI C environment. More, here. Another great example of combining hardware and software to make FPGAs "easy" is the CompactRIO platform from National Instruments. CompactRIO is powered by LabVIEW FPGA and LabVIEW Real-Time technologies, and combines an embedded real-time processor, a high-performance FPGA, and hot-swappable I/O modules.

The coolest new announcement in the space is a recent partnership between Aldec and Zuken. The two companies - one a leading FPGA tool vendor and the other a leading PCB design company - hope to make it easy to design FPGAs and optimize the complex interaction between FPGAs and the PCB. The goal is to allow changes in the one to easily be adapted by the other, mitigating the troublesome "hand off" from FPGA to PCB layout (and back again). "There is a growing challenge associated with adopting FPGA devices. By forging this partnership with Aldec to introduce a complete design and verification flow, we are tooling engineers with the latest technology to apply FPGAs with the minimum of effort," said Gerhard Lipski, Zuken Americas CEO and European General Manager. The company has published a useful overview to FPGA / PCB issues, here

Another big theme at DAC was FPGA "intellectual property" or "IP." As with FPGA software tools, IP vendors argue that independent IP allows designers "hardware independence." Mentor Graphics thus showcased their tools and "Intellectual Property" management software, based on Platform Express. Although Mentor is not an IP provider per se, their tool flow leverages IP-XACT (an XML-based IP cataloging system from the the Spirit Consortium) to allow designers to easily configurate and interoperate IP. Smaller, focused IP vendors active in the FPGA space include PLDA (primarily PCI, PCI-X, and PCI-Express IP, with a new PCIe Gen 2 IP) and CAST (which has a wide portfolio of IP, including a new JPEG 2000 Encoder Core and a new PCI Express model, complete with free PCIe Core Backend Model (CBM) Demo)