ICE in Brief

Lead, Never Follow

MISSION

• Product: Low Cost, High Performance, Digital Signal Processing
• Approach: Software Reconfigurable Hardware

SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

• Ported X-Midas to Linux PC for low-cost system-in-a-box and LapTop applications (1994).
• Developed JAVA based MIDAS technology for the Web. NeXtMidas = Networked XMidas.
• JAVA environment for graphics, portability, rhobustness, and industry interface (JAVABEANS).
• Java primitives support local host or browser based processing and/or real-time GUIs.
• Native code (C/C++/Fortran) processing primitives support local host or DSP nodes.
• Extended Midas macro language for application and GUI development at the engineering level.
• Two tier application model. Remote Midas InterFace with network bandwidth reduction hooks, embedded WebServer.
• Goal is to provide framework allowing Midas engineers to program hardware.
• Open source model – runs on Unix, Windows, or VMS.

HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE

• Developed ICE-PIC, high speed PCI data acquisition / playback (1996)
• Dual channel modular I/O.
• High-level programmable DSP.
• Run-time programmable Gate Array.
• Special purpose digital tuner chips.
• Multi-site modular Processing. (2002)
• Flexible data-flow and module interconnects.
• Drivers for Linux, OpenVMS, Digital Unix, Solaris, SGI, Windows-9X/NT, MacG3.
• Growing line of products – keeping in step with current technologies.

HARDWARE ENGINES

• DSPs – general purpose, good at FFTs, data movement, sequencing, terrible with bits. Easy to program.
• TigerSharc TS201 = 3.6GFlop, 14.4GOp, 5Gby/sec IO, 2.5Watts.
• FPGA – good at bits, serial correlation, data packing, terrible at floating point.
• Fixed point 16×16 multiply takes 100nS, 600 cells. Typical size 2-5000 cells. E321 algorithm in 1000 cells = one Alpha 4100.
• DIGITAL TUNERS – great for tuning, filtering. Low power. No programming.
• Graychip GC4016 = 4 chan, 100MHz, 18GOp.
• PLATFORM FPGA – Field Programmable Gate Arrays with RISC core, dedicated FP multipliers and 3GIO.
• With 44 MAC units at 250MHz = 22GOp. 3.2Gby/s full duplex serial IO bandwidth.
• At 2Watts per chip, it is possible to bring 22GOp to a Laptop, or 220GOp to a PCI slot. (Xilinx Virtex-II Pro or Altera Stratix)

FIXED POINT vs FLOATING POINT

• Floating point is easy to code, fixed point must handle scaling issues.
• Fixed point (usually 16bit) typically requires only 1/2 the IO bandwidth.
• Fixed point performance/power: 10GOp/W (PFPGA), 2GOp/W (TI6414).
• Floating point performance/power: 1GFlop/W (TMS), 0.5GFlop/W (TigerSharc), 0.2GFlop/W (Pentium).
• Telecommunications algorithms are usually fixed point code for portability/power reasons.
• Max processing in a PCI slot: 200GOp Fixed (PFPGA), 4GFlop Float (TMS).
• Max processing in a LapTop slot: 20GOp Fixed, 0.6GFlop Float (SHARC).
• There will always be more data to process than we have resources for. Maximize processing density.

THE NEAR FUTURE

• Extreme fixed/floating-point processing, running standard software primitives.
• 200GOp processing in PCI slot, 20GOp in Laptop.
• 10 Gbit/sec I/O architecture, with capture to disk.
• Hanging hardware off the network with RMIF (ICEBOX, ICE-NIC).