FusionXF FPGA Development Kit, Software and HDL libraries for accessing FPGA functionality

When integrating FPGAs in embedded real-time DSP system designs, developers are faced with the challenges of developing and debugging their FPGA logic and software, moving data efficiently between CPU nodes and FPGA nodes, and integrating it all into their overall system design while staying on schedule and within budget. VMETRO’s FusionXF development kit addresses these challenges and provides system design engineers with powerful and optimized software and FPGA infrastructure to save them man years of implementation time.

FusionXF is a collection of software and associated HDL functions to aid customers in the development of their FPGA algorithms and logic for VMETRO’s customer-programmable FPGA products. It is targeted at reducing the design time and optimizing the performance of complex embedded real-time DSP systems comprised of multiple FPGA and PowerPC processors. It also supports the use of VMETRO FPGA-based products (e.g., an FPGA XMC module) on x86-based host platforms.

FusionXF provides all of the building blocks to build a fully functional FPGA design to which a customer can integrate their FPGA logic and algorithms. It contains software functionality to enable the control and utilization of FPGA resources from a PowerPC processor. And, it provides efficient data streaming between a processor and FPGAs, internally in an FPGA or between distributed FPGAs in a fabric. Figure 1 illustrates an example embedded real-time DSP system. The board on the left is a hybrid PowerPC and FPGA processing engine with two CPU nodes, two on-board FPGAs, and an XMC site that is populated with an FPGA XMC card. The board on the right is a quad-FPGA processing engine that is connected to the hybrid processor board via High-Speed Serial (HSS) links across the backplane. FusionXF has the software and HDL components to implement all of the data paths shown in Figure 1 as well the mechanisms to provide high-performance, low-latency, low-overhead data movement across the data paths.

FusionXF is comprised of an HDL Development Kit (HDK) that contains HDL functions and a Software Development Kit (SDK) that contains drivers, application software libraries, and utilities. Extensive documentation and illustrative HDL and software examples are included to aid developers. Figure 2 shows the software and corresponding HDL layers in FusionXF. The layered architecture of FusionXF makes it very easy to migrate applications from one hardware platform to another. Only the hardware specific Board Support IP (BSIP) and the Board Support Package (BSP) will change when changing hardware platforms. All other components are hardware independent.

Hardware
FusionXF is currently supported on all new VMETRO processing hosts and FPGA boards, including M6000, VPF2, HPE640, HPE720, FPE650 and AD1500/3000.