Solid State Supplies Appointed by Mathstar

3rd August 2007

ES Admin

0 0

Solid State Supplies have added field reprogrammable ICs, which process logic functions at a clock rate of up to 1GHz, to their specialist component portfolio, following their appointment as the UK representative for US based manufacturer MathStar.

This new class of logic platform chips called Field Programmable Object Arrays (FPOAs) offer up to four times the performance of commercially available FPGAs. MathStar believe that system level solutions in many modern applications, such as image and media processing, have evolved to the point of requiring hundreds of billions of computations per second (GOPS) of digital processing performance to compete in today's markets.

To achieve these computational rates, many of these applications currently use special purpose ASICs which are generally viewed as cost effective only for large volume, fixed function applications. FPOAs are an attractive alternative to ASICs in high performance applications because they combine the life cycle cost, time-to-market and time-in-market advantages of existing programmable logic devices while delivering the performance of ASICs.

Consisting of silicon objects arranged in an internal grid pattern, memory and input/outputs, the object grid of an FPOA is overlaid with a patented, high speed interconnect system creating the silicon object array. This array of objects and interconnect matrix is programmed to execute unique customer applications. FPOAs provide a new way of implementing high performance algorithmic functions in silicon integrated circuits.

They are not programmed at the gate level but instead are programmed at the silicon object level, which reduces their development time and cost as compared to other methods of chip design. To enable more complete solutions, Mathstar is also offering enabling IP for various high end applications including MPEG2 Multichannel decoder and JPEG 2000 encoder/decoder.

Richard Bethell (left), Solid State’s Technical Director said: “We believe that FPOA’s are ideally suited to implement state of the art high performance video processing functionality to the professional video, machine vision, medical imaging and military/aerospace image processing applications.

“We are delighted with the appointment, enabling us to supply components and solutions which sit nicely with numerous leading edge products that we offer our customers and developers,” he added.