BittWare Releases Latest Version of BittWorks and OpenCL BSP for Arria 10 FPGA Boards

BittWare offers a complete range of FPGA boards designed to meet your needs. Their Arria 10 FPGA boards feature Intel’s high-end FPGAs to provide superior development productivity and unmatched performance. The latest boards feature PCIe x8 and x16 interfaces.

A10PL4	A10SA4
Intel Arria 10 GT/GX FPGA Low Profile PCIe Board with Dual QSFP and DDR4	Arria 10 GX Low Profile PCIe Board with QSFP and DDR4 on BittWare 'Spider' Thermal Platform
Datasheet	Datasheet

BittWare has put two decades of product design experience into creating a mature and robust suite of development tools that is tightly integrated with its FPGA products. These tools for system development and FPGA development shorten our customers’ learning curve while increasing their productivity, allowing them to reduce development costs and shorten their time to market.

OpenCL Bundle	BittWorks II Toolkit
BittWare’s OpenCL Developer’s Bundle provides the tools necessary to begin developing applications for the Altera Arria 10 or Stratix V using OpenCL. Open-CL dramatically simplifies FPGA development by enabling designers to code their systems and algorithms in a high-level C-based framework, directly generating FPGA programming files from a pure software development flow.	The BittWorks II Toolkit is a suite of development tools for BittWare’s FPGA-based hardware that serves as the main interface between the BittWare board and the host system. The Toolkit includes drivers, libraries, utilities, and example projects for accessing, integrating, and developing applications for the BittWare board.

• OpenCL BSP for Quartus 17.1.1 is now available for the A10PL4 and A10SA4. An updated Hello World example is also available for each board.

• Version 2018.1 of the BittWorks II Toolkit is now available. This is the first toolkit release of 2018. Software releases are numbered as the N'th release of the year. Software releases do not align with FPGA development environment software releases. This is a minor release. We recommend that you upgrade if you are using the Ubuntu operating system.

•  Release highlights: 

• Support for 4.10 kernel added for Ubuntu 16.04
• Fixed Ubuntu toolkit services
• Add missing BwShell functions

Please contact Sarsen Technology for more information.

BittWorks II Toolkit - Is it Even Necessary for my FPGA Development?

What is a Software Toolkit? 
Putting it simply, a software development toolkit is a set of tools that provides an interface between a hardware platform and a host system. Toolkits are critical if you want fast time to market. This is especially important for BittWare customers...

Why do I Need One?
BittWare has leveraged years of experience to provide a solid base for developers to make a start on their application, and the Toolkit has been an integral part of existing customer's success. They have been able to see first hand the value of the BittWorks tools, because they are so critical in getting projects up and running quickly. This software allows BittWare to properly support our customers.

More: BittWorks Toolkit

The BittWorks II Toolkit is a suite of development tools for BittWare’s FPGA-based hardware. The Toolkit includes drivers, libraries, utilities, and example projects for accessing, integrating, and developing applications for the BittWare board. Utilities and drivers connect the board to the host via PCIe, USB, Ethernet, or serial port, and provide easy access to the board’s system monitoring features and Flash programming.

Extensive libraries provide a consistent, intuitive API for integrating the board into the system and example projects illustrate data movement and provide a starting point for development. The Toolkit supports 64-bit Windows and Linux platforms and is tightly integrated with BittWare’s FPGA Development Kit (FDK), which provides FPGA board support IP and integration for BittWare’s FPGA-based boards.

The Nerdy Stuff
The BittWorks II datasheet is a great tool and clearly outlines what is provided and how it can help you get your application up and running quickly.

View Datasheet

Do I Need To Pay For It?
Well, yes. But BittWare doesn't currently charge for support (unlike some of the other board manufacturers in this market space) and this is only possible because of the development tools available. If a developer has the BittWorks Toolkit BittWare are able to provide the utilities they need to use the board as well as provide known working examples for the customers to leverage.

Toolkit licenses are handled per project/per location.  For a single project at one location there is a maximum of 3 licenses to be purchased. This means is that if there are 10 developers working on Project X you only need to buy 3 licenses.

Tell Me More...
If you'd like more information on how the BittWorks Toolkit and FDK can help speed up your development on both Intel (Altera) and Xilinx FPGA based hardware please get in touch with one of our specialists: info@sarsen.net