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Xilinx Debuts Virtex-5 FXT, Expands SXT Platform By BDTI, 5/28/2008 At the end of March, Xilinx announced availability of the first two members of its Virtex-5 FXT platform, the FX30T and FX70T. The Virtex-5 FXT platform is geared towards serial communications and embedded applications, and joins three other Virtex-5 platforms: the LX, which is intended for logic-intensive applications; the LXT, which targets logic and serial communications; and the SXT, which is intended for serial communications and DSP. (The “T” in the platform name indicates that the chips contain transceivers.) Target applications for the new FXT chips include video-over-IP, wireless base stations, and other high-performance applications. (More)

Altera Jumps to 40 nm with Stratix IV By BDTI, 5/28/2008 Not to be outdone by rival Xilinx, Altera has made a major announcement of its own. In mid-May, Altera unveiled its next-generation high-performance FPGA family, the Stratix IV, and announced that the family will be fabbed in a 40 nm TSMC process.  Xilinx beat Altera to the 65 nm node with its Virtex-5 chips, but with this announcement, it appears that Altera will leapfrog Xilinx to 40 nm—assuming that Xilinx doesn’t come out with 40 nm chips before the Stratix IV is expected to start sampling, towards the end of this year. (More)

Case Study: Making Compilers Smarter By BDTI, 5/28/2008 Fifteen years ago DSP engineers expected to write and optimize most of their software in assembly language, and they did it on DSP processors with obscure and highly specialized instruction sets.  Back then, compilers for DSP processors were inefficient and couldn’t use many of the processors’ specialized performance-improving features. If you wanted to use bit-reversed addressing or circular buffers or fill delay slots, for example, you’d have to write that code yourself. (More)

Jeff Bier's Impulse Response—“DSP” becomes ubiquitous, passé By Jeff Bier, 5/28/2008 When my partners and I founded BDTI back in the early 90’s, “DSP” was in the process of becoming both a hot technology and a widely used abbreviation. The abbreviation meant two distinct things: digital signal processing, and digital signal processor.  You could usually figure out which one was meant by the context, but in some ways they were interchangeable—if you were doing digital signal processing, you were probably doing it on a digital signal processor. (More)