PROCStarIII family of reconfigurable embedded compute accelerator solutions

GiDEL – a supplier of FPGA-based compute accelerator systems – has announced their new PROCStarIII family of products. This product family is targeted at machine vision, imaging, and high performance, embedded computing applications. The system's Stratix III FPGAs provide reconfigurable hardware implementation of users' algorithms to deliver application specific processing acceleration. The system also delivers high speed SoC prototyping and debugging for pipelined dataflow intensive SoCs.

The PROCStarIII can be configured with a broad range of Stratix III FPGAs to match both the computational capacity and speed of the system to the user's requirements. Rich in arithmetic and memory elements, the Stratix III E FPGAs are ideal for DSP and memory-intensive applications such as image and signal processing. The Stratix III L-FPGAs are ideal for SoC prototyping. The PROCStarIII is CameraLink registered as a Frame Grabber and Image Processing product, like the PROCStarII, PROCSparkII, and PROCe systems.

Key Features of the PROCStarIII are as follows:

• 1-4 Stratix III 80E, 110E, 260E or 150L FPGAs
• 8 lanes of PCI Express for 2GB/s bandwidth host communications
• 8 SODIMM slots for up to 16 GB of on board memory
• 256MB DDR2 memory per FPGA (1GB DDR2 max.)
• 1 G Ethernet host communications
• Support for up to five application specific PROC daughter cards – CameraLink, DVI, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.
• Typical system clock speeds of 150-350 MHz
• High-performance system-to-system interconnection
• Standalone operation

The PROCStarIII system can be configured for machine vision, automated optical inspection, medical image processing, high performance computing, video processing, and communications applications. With the PROC Developer's Kit, there is no need to design a custom board, a PCI Express driver, an application driver layer, define board constraints, design memory controllers or write host interface code. These are all delivered with the product or generated with the developer tools. This saves months of effort and enables designers to focus on their proprietary value-added design.

Optional PROC_HILs software automates the FPGA implementation of algorithms created with model-based tools like MathWorks' HDL Coder and Altera's DSP Builder. PROC_HILs also automatically generates the wrappers to allow the PROCStarIII to accelerate Simulink simulations by replacing the original software based algorithm models with the PROCStarIII.

The PROCStarIII system is available to ship in the fourth quarter of 2007. Configurations and pricing can be obtained by contacting GiDEL.