Avnet Virtex-6 FPGA DSP Development Kit Jump-Starts DSP Designs with Industry’s Most Widely-Adopted DSP Design Flows

The Avnet Electronics Marketing operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), announces the availability of the Xilinx^® Virtex^®-6 FPGA DSP Development Kit as part of the Xilinx Targeted Design Platform for DSP design. Order entry is now open for the $2,995 kit that includes a device-locked version of ISE^® Design Suite: System Edition 11.4, which can be downloaded today so developers can quickly get started on their designs.

Wireless, aerospace and defense, instrumentation and medical imaging applications and other computationally-intensive applications demand greater digital signal processing performance and functionality to support high performance systems. This thirst for performance is made all the more challenging when combined with the need to react to emerging and/or changing standards. FPGAs provide an ideal solution to these problems; single-chip TeraMAC/s performance and re-programmability that enable differentiation in a changing world.

To address this challenge, Avnet has worked with Xilinx to develop and release the first DSP development kit that combines Virtex-6 FPGA devices, a scalable development board, DSP IP, complete documentation and cables, with a Targeted Reference Design, and the DSP development tools required to evaluate, modify and extend the design. For the first time, DSP designers can compare the merits of RTL against high-level design flows that use languages such as C/C++ and MATLAB® / Simulink® software to determine the best design flow to bring their products to release. The Virtex-6 FPGA DSP Kit provides up to a 10x productivity advantage and an easier entry point for using FPGAs for DSP. By combining the elements of a total solution, the kit enables users to focus on the unique value of their design from the beginning of their design process.

"With the introduction of the Virtex-6 FPGA DSP Kit, Avnet is offering its first domain specific targeted design platform,” said Jim Beneke, vice president, global technical marketing at Avnet Electronics Marketing. "This kit will help our customers quickly learn the different tool flows and design techniques involved in creating DSP-centric designs with the Virtex-6 FPGA family.”

A key component of the kit is the preconfigured and fully validated Virtex-6 DSP Targeted Reference Design. This design serves as a basis to illustrate DSP techniques and design flows for- Virtex-6 class of signal processing functions. The state of the art digital up converter (DUC) / digital down converter (DDC) Targeted Reference Design shows customers how to use advanced techniques such as clock over sampling, time division multiplexing and using high performance DSP48 slices for optimizing signal processing performance and resource use. The design flow based on Simulink and MATLAB from The MathWorks^TM allows algorithm developers to create DSP hardware designs using a familiar modeling environment without the need to learn RTL. Experienced RTL designers are provided design techniques for creating efficient DSP hardware using ISE Design Suite and LogicCore^TM DSP IP along with verification methodologies for comparing functional correctness against high-level algorithm models.

Below are the key deliverables of the Virtex-6 DSP Targeted Reference Design:

• Design Source files for RTL and Simulink
• Top level system integration RTL source files
• Simulation environment
• Testbenches
• Implementation environment
• Complete steps and parameters for design synthesis
• MAP, place and route and timing closure
• Targeted reference design tutorials including recommended flows for design modification and integration

"The Virtex-6 DSP Development kit enables customers to get started immediately with a great out of the box experience and choice of design flows that maximizes customers’ productivity using Virtex-6 FPGA technology,” said Tim Erjavec, senior director, platform solutions and services marketing at Xilinx. "The DSP targeted reference design included in the kit provides an easy to use, reusable design infrastructure to accelerate customers’ application development, and is a great example of how Xilinx is partnering with industry leaders like Avnet to rapidly deploy Targeted Design Platforms.”

For complete kit specs and to purchase, please visit www.em.avnet.com/virtex6dsp.

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About Avnet Electronics Marketing

Avnet Electronics Marketing is an operating group of Phoenix-based Avnet, Inc. that serves electronic original equipment manufacturers (EOEMs) and electronic manufacturing services (EMS) providers in more than 70 countries, distributing electronic components from leading manufacturers and providing associated design-chain and supply-chain services. The group's Web site is located at www.em.avnet.com. Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), a Fortune 500 company, is one of the largest distributors of electronic components, computer products and embedded technology in the world. Avnet accelerates its partners’ success by connecting the world’s leading technology suppliers with a broad base of more than 100,000 customers and providing cost-effective, value-added services and solutions. For the fiscal year ended June 27, 2009, Avnet generated revenue of $16.23 billion. For more information, visit www.avnet.com.