On top of the 550-plus technical paper presentations at this week's Global Signal Processing Expo Conference (GSPx) on DSP technology at the Hotel Intercontinental in Addison, Texas, many firms will introduce products advancing the state of the art in signal processing.
In a special New Product Forum on April 1, Analog Devices (www.analog.com) will unveil a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) module that can deliver 800 Msamples/s. To do that, the AS12500's new architecture combines four parallel monolithic ADCs. The parallel converters' outputs are post-processed to reduce analog mismatches, such as gain mismatch, phase distortion, and clock skew.
DNA Computing Solutions Inc. (www.dna-cs.com) will detail its Eagle System, a flexible compute platform that tightly couples FPGAs and PowerPC processors to create computational capabilities of over 10 GFLOPS. The Eagle architecture can be expanded to multiple boards and chassis to address varying data-processing and I/O-data rates. The architectural approach applies FPGA-based computing techniques to the "pre-processing" and data reorganizational portions of applications.
Sky Computers (www.skycomputers.com) will debut another compute platform, the SMART System Architecture. Based on industry standards, the system provides access to a wide choice of tools and libraries and enables application portability. The platform's hardware portion, the SMARTpac 500, consists of a data-acquisition server in a 2U rack format. The server holds up to four compute or I/O blades and one management blade, all based on 7455 Altivec PowerPC CPUs. There are also three HCA links to InfiniBand interfaces. The platform's software portion consists of the SMART System Architecture, which is divided into a development environment and a run-time environment. The development environment comes from Kdevelop and includes compilers, build tools, and documentation tools.
Traquair Data Systems (www.traquair.com) will unveil an ultra-compact system in a module that combines DSP and FPGA along with a 400-Mbit/s IEEE 1394 FireWire bridge interface (see the figure). The module fits inside many digital cameras, providing ready-to-use embedded DSP, FPGA, and FireWire capability.
Synergetic Computing Systems (www.synputer.com) will describe a novel multiple-instruction-multiple-data processor. The Synputer targets high-performance but low-power DSP applications. Also, RF Engines (www.rfel.com) will show off a dynamically reconfigurable radio spectrum channelizer. It lets users dynamically select sections of spectrum of differing bandwidths from a broad band of spectrum and acquire and process these channels in real time.
For details, go to www.gspx.com.