3L Diamond and Impulse CoDeveloper for Lyrtech is available immediately

The folks at 3L (a leading provider of multiprocessor design software) and the folks at Impulse Accelerated Technologies (creators of the CoDeveloper suite of C-to-FPGA design tools) have announced a new design flow that targets multiprocessor systems from the signal processing specialists at Lyrtech.

By integrating the 3L Diamond multiprocessor tool suite and CoDeveloper, the design flow accelerates the creation, debug, verification, and implementation of very complex applications that require multiprocessor performance. Ease-of-use features enhance design productivity, and tight integration with Lyrtech hardware frees the designer from the platform architecture to focus effort on application optimization.

At the core of the 3L Diamond tool suite is a multiprocessor model that provides an extremely straight-forward but powerful way of developing applications for multiprocessor systems. 3L Diamond helps the designer create tasks that are self-contained blocks of code which communicate with other tasks on DSP, FPGA or GPP fabrics. The low latency inter-processor communications and synchronization between the tasks are automatically created by 3L Diamond.

The joint solution provided by 3L and Impulse provides a level of design abstraction that is said to be unique for DSP+FPGA multiprocessor systems. The Impulse CoDeveloper tools allow C-language applications to be quickly and efficiently retargeted to FPGA devices. This enables application developers to rapidly exploit the inherent parallel processing features of FPGA technology and accelerate signal processing applications.

When this capability is put together with 3L Diamond, the shared level of abstraction can mask platform level details and offer designer independence from the hardware. And because the application structure is independent of the processors on which the tasks are placed, the designer has greater freedom to explore the design space by simply dragging and dropping different tasks onto different processor targets, at any stage of the design flow.

The joint 3L/ Impulse design flow is targeted in the first instance at Lyrtech's SMQ range of DSP-FPGA high performance computing platforms. The SMQ (SignalMaster Quad) features a combination of FPGA and DSP devices designed around two clusters of one Virtex 4 LX FPGA and two TMS320C6416 DSPs.

Each cluster can yield up to 16,000 MIPS/MMACS of DSP processing power and 48 GMACS of FPGA-based DSP processing power. It features Dual LYRIO+ very-high-speed expansion sites, 128-MB external SDRAM per DSP and FPGA, and six 8-Gbps RapidCHANNEL onboard links.

3L Diamond and Impulse CoDeveloper for Lyrtech is available immediately. For more information visit www.3L.com or contact lyrtech@3L.com.