Date: 09/07/2009

FPGA kit allows to synergize your DSP and embedded skills with least FPGA exposure

It's hard to find an off-the-shelf standard microcontroller or SoC device, which has all the wishful ready functions inside the chip for your innovative embedded system application where you need a processor to handle a set of unique and complex DSP functions plus with a set of communication interfaces. This kind of requirement is driving the FPGA market, where FPGA offers both cost-effective and secure solutions for not only customized designs and also for low-volume high-end systems requiring SoC class devices.

To boost this trend, FPGA vendors are offering highly design automated FPGA design platform and FPGA devices in broad price ranges. The top ranked FPGA vendor Xilinx new kit named SP601 for its Spartan-6 FPGA family packs quite a interesting stuff both for newbies in FPGA world and also for FPGA veterans.

The new kit has board, manuals/documents, reference designs, and ISE/ Design software. The ISE/ design software version 11.2 has a user friendly GUI. The kit allows to execute powerful image processing functions. The software supports both Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA families and is designed to work with the latest software from Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and Synopsys.

Brent Przybus, Director Product-Marketing, Xilinx says this kit allows to develop better solutions compared to the designs based on ASICs and ASSPs.