The European Union’s FP7 FlexTiles 3D SoC project tabbed Sundance’s dual-FPGA platform as its prototyping platform. The SMT166 will initially be used to develop, validate, and verify the tools to create the FlexTiles 3D SoC. Subsequently, it will serve as an R&D platform to prototype products based on the chip.
Headed by Thales Research & Technology, the EU FP7 FlexTiles project espouses using multicore technology to develop energy-efficient, high-performance computing systems. The project will define and develop a programmable, heterogeneous, many-core 3D SoC architecture. The many-core layer, integrating general-purpose-processor (GPP) and digital-signal-processor (DSP) cores, will be associated with a reconfigurable virtualization layer that features a self-adaptive FPGA fabric in an interchangeable tiles concept.
The SMT166 is designed for R&D into using large FPGAs for high-performance reconfigurable computing and large-scale embedded systems, as well as SoC simulation. It’s designed around two Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs; each is responsible for routing data to and from half of the Sundance Local Bus (SLB) connections on the board. The board supports up to four SLB mezzanine modules, which include ADCs, a software-defined radio platform, or a MIMO 8 by 8 RF transceiver.