Sundance, a supplier of digital signal processing and reconfigurable FPGA systems, has partnered with Dillon Engineering, a provider of embedded DSP algorithms IP and services, to deliver a joint solution for fixed width and floating point FFT FPGA market. The solution makes available Dillon’s benchmark portfolio of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) IP on the Sundance SMT702 dual ADC, PXIe embedded computing module. Dillon's FFT cores occupy fewer FPGA logic resources in terms of XtremeDSP slices and BRAMs than comparable off-the-shelf FFT cores.

The IEEE-754 Floating-point FFT core sustains a rate up to 250Msps to deliver a 36 percent faster performance versus comparable cores. By offering a FFT length up to 64M points, the core sets the industry benchmark. The joint solution is supported by design support from the 3L Diamond multiprocessor tool suite and a bit-accurate and MATLAB compatible C/C++ model, testbench, datasets and data generators. The FFT cores are initially available on the Sundance SMT702 module. They include pipelined for continuous processing; parallel and dual parallel for concurrent processing and performance of over 25Gsps; ultralong using the SMT702s external DDR2 SDRAM for long transforms up to 64M points; parallel butterfly; mixed radix; and 2D/3D multi-dimensional FFT processing. The SMT702 is fitted with the fastest Xilinx Virtex-5 LX110T-3 FPGA and delivers data rates of up to 250Msps and up to 64M points IEEE-754 single precision FFT.

The FPGA is supported by 2 banks of 64-bit 512Mb DDR2 SDRAM and dual 3GHz ADC that can be combined to deliver 6 Gsps. 8-lanes of PXI Express deliver 16Gb/s of effective bandwidth per direction and the module can plug in to any PXI Express peripheral slot or any PXI Express hybrid slot. Dillon Engineering’s pipelined floating-point FFT uses modular Radix-2 FFT architecture to provide discrete transform on data frames or continuous data streams, with sample rates up to the maximum clock frequency. This structure employs a single butterfly and single delay feedback path per rank for low localized memory usage. True IEEE-754 floating-point data is maintained throughout, supporting a large dynamic range of data without requiring complicated fixed-point analysis.

The SMT702 is immediately available with a number of different Dillon FFT IP options. Prices subject to FFT core and configuration.