PrismTech Demonstrates Breakthrough FPGA Technology to Support Software Defined Radio Waveform Portability and Reuse; Integrated Circuit ORB Offers 100x Performance Improvement over Software ORBs; Removes Barriers to FPGA Use in SDR

Business Wire, Nov 14, 2005

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- PrismTech, a leading provider of productivity tools and middleware, today unveiled a breakthrough FPGA middleware technology, its Spectra ICO (Integrated Circuit ORB). E[acute accent]The Spectra ICO demonstration introduced at SDR'05, the SDR Forum's Annual Conference, illustrates how a CORBA(R) ORB can be embedded natively in an FPGA and used to control logic within the FPGA.

E[acute accent]Using Spectra ICO, one eliminates the need to develop custom proxies on General Purpose Processors (GPPs) and Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) that simply serve to establish communication to waveform objects residing within FPGAs. These proxies (sometimes referred to as Hardware Abstraction Layers or HALs) have been used when designing to SDR architectures such as the Software Communications Architecture (SCA) and are meant to increase portability and re-use, but in practice, tend to increase latency, reduce throughput, and lower re-use potential. E[acute accent]Spectra ICO further eliminates any need to embed GPP cores into FPGAs in order to offer software ORB capability. Although viable, this approach tends to require significant gate count and memory utilization and generally these processing cores cannot be clocked fast enough to deal with the ever-increasing performance requirements of SDR applications. E[acute accent]The Spectra ICO demo equipment consists of a PC running the client code (developed using a PrismTech OpenFusion C ORB) and an Altera Cyclone II development board that hosts the FPGA. The software running on the PC generates a CORBA GIOP message bound for the ICO, encapsulates it in an Ethernet frame and transmits the packet to the demonstration board. An Ethernet controller on the Altera FPGA demo board receives the packet, strips off the Ethernet encapsulation and passes the GIOP message to the ICO residing within the FPGA. The ICO processes the message, extracts the data in the message body and transfers it to the internal logic blocks of the FPGA representing the custom signal processing design blocks of an SDR waveform. If required by the CORBA message, the ICO generates and sends a reply message back to the client on the PC. E[acute accent]Spectra ICO utilizes approximately 5% of the logic elements of an Altera EP2C35 and no memory blocks. Initial benchmarks have shown it to process CORBA messages at rates exceeding 100 times those found in software ORBs. When combined with PrismTech's soon to be released capability to generate VHDL code directly from the Spectra SE modeling tool, Spectra ICO will ease the burden of developing SCA-compliant VHDL implementations for SDR developers. E[acute accent]Spectra ICO is part of the Spectra Power Tools product line of software tools and operating environments for SDR development and deployment. Spectra Power Tools eliminate the need to handcraft SDR solutions, ensure best practice software design and standards conformance, and help insulate developers from the complexities of SDR architectures. They thus facilitate higher engineer productivity, shorter time-to-market, and application reuse, portability and evolution. Spectra Power Tools currently support the military radio Software Communications Architecture (SCA) v2.2 specification, but are capable of being applied to any software-based communications architecture. Efforts are currently underway to develop Spectra Tools for various commercial SDR domains such as 3G cellular and 802.16 (WiMAX). E[acute accent]Introducing Spectra ICO, PrismTech's VP of SDR Engineering, Dominick Paniscotti, said, "We believe that this breakthrough technology finally allows practical SDR waveform portability and reuse across GPP, DSP and FPGA processing elements. Together with PrismTech's embedded C and C ORBs (for GPPs and DSPs), we now have a complete and unique middleware solution for SDR Operating Environments (OEs) that does not impose undue overhead on the radio platform. With these technology advances in OEs, and the development tools support offered by Spectra SE, we are rapidly removing the perceived barriers to wide scale SDR adoption, namely SW&P overhead, waveform portability and developer productivity. Going into 2006, SDR is for the first time becoming commercially viable by addressing a clear business case (time-to-market reduction and increased component flexibility and cost advantage) with a robust solution." E[acute accent]PrismTech's SDR chief scientist, Jerry Bickle, added, "Spectra ICO's 100x performance leap over software ORBs is truly a technology breakthrough and brings the FPGA into the SCA domain as a 'first-class citizen' for the first time. As an originator of the SCA, it pleases me greatly to see the technology emerging to fully exploit the power of a standardized SDR architecture." E[acute accent]For further information about the Spectra Power Tools product line please visit PrismTech's website at http://www.prismtech.com. E[acute accent]Finally, PrismTech wishes to acknowledge the greatly appreciated support of Altera, and especially Joel Seely, in facilitating the development of Spectra ICO.