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.

Are you a Successful Person?

This isnt the normal type of blog post we put up, but I thought it was really interesting.

I saw this infographic on LinkedIn today, and it made me think about how I act and how I could improve my own performance. I think I'm definitely more green than yellow, but I do watch TV every day, and I'm not sure if a Filofax counts as a journal....

Its a thought provoking exercise, but it's important to keep improving and challenging yourself.

So I'm doing my bit:

Dear Diary...

Sarsen Technology is here if you need us, Santa!

Things are ramping up at the North Pole....

On the run up to Christmas Eve, Santa has to go through his list of names, and check it twice, to see who has been naughty and who has been nice. He then has to decide which toy each child deserves. It’s a long process, and it could be much simpler, using BLITzEN – the BittWare Low latency Intelligent Toy Evaluation Network.

It’s based on the Altera Stratix V FPGA, provides CPU offload, the highest performance transceivers , and with maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements it’s perfect for Santa’s busy Workshop, as it helps him to determine not just what children want but rather what they deserve.

Those Reindeer are an essential part of the process, and Santa knows he needs to make sure they are happy and performing at their best. The UEI Cube is small and rugged, and can be used to measure the tension on their specially adapted harnesses using its strain gauge layers, so Santa knows the second there are any problems. That sleigh is heavy!

Flying around the world in a reindeer-drawn sleigh would be made much easier with a display system running on the Copperhead Core i7 EBX board from VersaLogic. Its performance level allows for the integration of multiple high-bandwidth functions, such as digital signal processing and real-time video processing. The Copperhead features a high-speed memory interface, up to 16 GB on-board RAM capacity, and three independent display outputs, so Santa can check his route, run his aforementioned naughty-or-nice list, and still video-chat with the sleigh-port, an underground facility run by Elves that serves as a command and control centre. 

Phew! Its a busy time for the guys and girls at the North Pole, but don't worry Santa, Sarsen Technology is here to help. Give us a call on +44 1672 511166 or drop us an email!!

BittWare's Anemone - A New Approach to Floating Point DSP

Ah-ne-MO-nee
It’s a word that is quite often mis-pronounced.
It’s not Ane-No-Me. Or worse – An-En-ema. Definitely not that!

BittWare’s first generation Anemone chip, the Anemone104 (AN104) is a completely scalable multicore processor with 16 eCores that provide a total sustained performance of 19.2 GFLOPS while consuming only 1 Watt of core power.

Featuring the Epiphany architecture from Adapteva, the BittWare Anemone combines the best assets of both FPGA and floating point DSP technology, thereby offering a completely new approach to floating point digital signal processing. The FPGA handles all the memory, I/O interfacing, protocol processing, and special functions, in addition to any computational tasks it may perform. This leaves the Anemone free to perform the complex processing tasks that DSPs are ideal for.

The AN104 features an internal high-throughput mesh network, with separate data paths for on-chip and off-chip communications. Total on-chip, inter-core bandwidth is 76.8 GBytes/sec full duplex, with an additional 8 GBytes/sec of off-chip bandwidth.

The BittWare Anemone Evaluation Kit provides a cost-effective way to begin evaluating the Anemone co-processor for FPGAs, featuring an Anemone104 and Altera Stratix III FPGA based evaluation board - ready to use out of the box, with the Ubuntu Linux OS and Anemone development tools installed on an included laptop.

This is pretty new technology – if you would like more information give the Sarsen sales team a call on +44 1672 511166 or send us an email.

Super Speed HFT with BittWare FPGA PCIe boards

High Frequency Trading is made even faster with FPGA Solutions from BittWare!

In layman’s terms, high-frequency trading (also known as HFT) is the buying and selling of stocks at super fast speeds, with the help of very powerful computers. Using complex algorithms, these computers can scan dozens of public and private marketplaces at the same time and execute millions of orders a second.

High-frequency trading is highly dependent on ultra-low latency as well as ever-faster analysis/data correlation. The products used also need to achieve maximum performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements. BittWare offers a range of FPGA-based PCIe COTS solutions to address the challenges of developing financial applications.

BittWare’s Stratix V PCIe cards offer the industry’s highest performance FPGA for network and algorithm acceleration. These boards provide the ultimate in low latency with high performance FPGA transceivers (no external PHY) and optional TCP/IP offload engine. With maximum processing performance per watt to minimize energy and thermal requirements and QDR II/II+ combined with 10GigE straight to the FPGA (no conversion to XAUI) for ultra-low latency, BittWare’s PCIe boards are ideal for applications in the High Frequency Trading (HFT) market.

Fixnetix, global managed services provider for trading, market data and risk control, were the first fintech (financial technology) company in Europe to offer the Altera Stratix V FPGA on the BittWare PCI Express slot-cards. The Altera Stratix V FPGA with integrated 10GigE and BittWare PCIe Gen 3 slot card is ideal for iX-eCute, the Fixnetix FPGA firmware for nanosecond trading and pre-trade risk checks across multiple asset classes. BittWare PCI Express slot-cards are the hardware boards that iX-eCute operates on whilst Altera Stratix is the industry's highest performance FPGA with over 1 TeraFLOPS of processing.

If you would like more information about how the BittWare hardware could work in your application please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email!

Supporting the 3rd Gen Intel Core™ i7 Processor Across Eight Industry-Standard Form Factors....

Extreme Engineering Solutions, Inc (X-ES) has remained at the forefront of leading edge technologies over the years, by developing numerous designs based on Intel® Pentium®, Core™ Duo, Core™2 Duo, and Atom™ processors.

 

Continuing in this tradition, X-ES has embraced the embedded Intel® Core™ i7 processors and had design experience with the (first generation) Intel Core i7 processor, the 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processor, and the 3rd generation Intel Core i7 processor.

The 3rd generation Intel Core i7 processors are the first chips in the world made using Intel’s 22-nanometer (nm) 3-D tri-Gate transistor technology. This generation Intel Core i7 processor provides up to twice the HD media and 3-D graphics performance, as well as significant processor performance improvements over the previous generation of Intel Core i7 processors.

X-ES has coupled this revolutionary processor technology with the Intel® QM57 Express and  QM67 Express chipsets, low-power interface controllers. These power-efficient devices offer integrated PCI Express, USB, SATA 3.0 Gb/s, and graphics interfaces. The Intel Core i7 processor coupled with the Intel QM57/QM67 Express chipset provides high performance within an embedded power budget.

The XPedite7470 3U VPX SBC and the XCalibur4401 6U CompactPCI SBC were the first products available from X-ES to support the 3rd Gen Intel Core i7 processor, and

X-ES is supporting the 3rd Gen Intel Core™ i7 Processor across eight industry-standard form factors:

• COM Express
• 3U VPX
• 6U VPX
• 3U CompactPCI
• 6U CompactPCI
• VME
• Air-cooled PrPMC/XMC
• Conduction-cooled PrPMC/XMC

For more information on these or any X-ES products please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 or email us: info@sarsen.net

Have a great weekend!
 

VersaLogic launches BRAND NEW family of Embedded Single Board Computers

Roughly the size of a credit card and less than one inch thick, the Falcon is the industry’s smallest, lightest weight, and lowest power x86 rugged, embedded computer. 

The new Falcon EPU release from VersaLogic means we are talking to people about all kids of applications, including Mil-Aero, Medical, Security, R&D and Robotics. It’s a really compact board, (weighing under 40g) so it’s also a brilliant solution for use in for portable applications and unmanned systems where Size, Weight and Power consumption (SWaP) are critical design elements. 

It’s the first in a new family of VersaLogic Embedded Processing Units. EPUs combine processor, memory, video, and numerous system interfaces into an extremely compact embedded computer. 

Standard on-board features include up to 2 GB soldered-on RAM and a microSD socket. The standard Type 10 pin-out provides SDVO, LVDS, GbE, SATA, seven USB ports, three x1 PCIe lanes, two COM interfaces, HD audio, LPC, SDIO, GPIO, SMBus, and I2C to the baseboard. VersaLogic also offer an auxiliary board-to-board connector providing two additional COM interfaces, two GPIO lines, and one CAN interface. The Falcon is compatible with most x86 operating systems including Windows, Windows Embedded, Linux, and VxWorks. 

In a departure from their well-established high reliability PC/104 based product line, VersaLogic have applied the same strict quality and manufacturing practices to the PICMG Com Express form factor. Plus, offering a 5+ year availability guarantee and a 2 year warranty as standard on board level products you know your project is in safe hands. 

VersaLogic offer a 45 day evaluation scheme where you can 'try before you buy'. Evals are limited to single quantities of a specific product (including memory and development peripherals) and an evaluation survey needs to be completed before the product can be returned. 

If you would like more information on this exciting new product, or if you'd like to get your name on the list for an evaluation board please give us a call on +44 1672 511166, or email us - info@sarsen.net .