Distributed Feeds

Xilinx's Series 7 Kintex and Virtex FPGA development boards sport dual FMC expansion support.

LDRA extends its tool suite to support direct integration with Altera’s Embedded Design Suite (EDS) for Nios II soft core processors.

Xilinx launches its first design platforms for accelerating system development and integration with its 28-nm 7 series field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

 The 38th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON) is going to be held in Montreal, Canada on October 25-28th 2012 ! Topics of this conference are (not limited to) :

- Power electronics and energy conversion

- Renable Energy & Sustainable Development

- Power Systems

- Electronics System-on-chip & Real Time Embedded Control (I chair this one !)

- Signal and Image Processing & Computational Intelligence

- Electrical Machines & Drives

- Control Systems & Applications

- Sensors, Actuators and Systems Integration

- Mechatronics & Robotics

- Factory Automation & Industrial Informatics

 Follow this link for the official call for paper :

 http://www.iecon2012.org/file/Call_for_papers.pdf

 See you there in october !

For use in DSP-, FPGA-, and MCU-based systems, the CMX7861 analog front end combines codec, embedded signal processing, and auxiliary system support for interfacing between analog and digital systems.

“My goal was to implement an older embedded system entirely in VHDL. I chose the NES due to its complexity and variety of subsystems. The idea is to prove that chips can be modeled in VHDL and synthesized on an FPGA to replace either single ICs in old systems or the systems themselves.”

PyroFactor: Read

Bill Wong of Electronic Design magazine talks with Aaron Behman of Xilinx about several products including their ZYNQ...

Bill Wong of Electronic Design magazine talks with Aaron Behman of Xilinx about their 4K2K reference design based on...

If you know a bit about MIDI then you know that you can create music files out of notes. There are plenty of PC software that allows doing that. This Visual Music Composer tries to get rid of PC. Project is based on Altera DE2 FPGA board and this is where whole fun happens. Since there is no PC board has to take care of human input interface where PC keyboard is used. You can’t write notes if you don’t see them. So a another part is a VGA output – you can see what you’re doing on VGA screen.

WPvideo 1.10

And of course there another hidden part – the brain “music reader and converter” which resides inside FPGA chip. Code reads whats been input by user and then converts music data in to audio signal. The interface is fairly simple. In VGA screen you can see a set of available notes and other music specific symbols and then you have music sheet where you can pick and place notes. It has lots of limitations. Seems it can’t play chords and there is no support for half tones. But its already fun to play.

     The Altera UP2 Dev Board may be a bit antiquated but it still provides an awesome learning platform for under- grad university students.
     This week's article will introduce 4 of the final projects from California State University Chico's EECE 343 course: Computer Interface Circuits. Each final project has a video of the project in action as well as the FPGA source code available for download.

PyroFactor: Read

“The main goals of this project was to learn Verilog, to learn about buses and to create a platform for future projects which require the parallelism and/or exact timing of an FPGA combined with the ease of programming of a general purpose PC. An example of a future project is a programmable function generator. At the command of an application running on the PC, the FPGA can generate square waves or PWM signals to feed into a device under test.”

PyroFactor: Read

To begin 2012, let’s recap major events/announcements that have been made in the exciting world of FPGA-based motor control during 2011:

FPGA vendors

In March, Microsemi announced its new Industrial Ecosystem for SmartFusion Intelligent Mixed Signal FPGAs. This ecosystem is intended to specifically address the following markets/applications: Power Metering and Smart Grid, Motor Control (PMSM, BLDC, Stepper), Human-Machine Interfaces, Displays and Field Devices. A week later, Microsemi announced their comprehensive product portfolio for solar power applications which includes computing devices (SmartFusion) but also analog and switching components (IGBT, diodes, etc.) - which is the logic result of the Microsemi’s acquisition of Actel during fall 2010 (on this thread read this). Unfortunately, no news on the announced SmartFusion-based motor control development kit during the year, but those who did attend APEC 2011 at Forth Worth, TX, have had the chance to have a look at Microsemi’s SmartFusion FPGA-based motor control development kit at Alizem’s booth:

On Xilinx’s side, 2011 has been an important year with the release of their new ARM-based Zynq devices and also the release of a new Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA-based motor control development kit. The big news regarding Xilinx’s Zynq for FPGA-based motor control designers is that it has integrated A2D converters, an element that’s crucial to advanced motor drives systems. Except Microsemi’s SmartFusion, no FPGA vendor had a device with integrated A2Ds and this was certainly one important point missing against conventionnal devices (DSPs & MCUs) which all have integrated A2Ds for control system applications.  According to Xilinx, this new Zynq device is going to be in production by the end of 2012 and it is positionned as a device that’s more than a processor, more than an asic and more than an fpga.

On Altera’s side, a new Motor Control development kit has been released during the summer and based on Arrow’s BeMicro low-cost form factor (145$). This platform is intended as an introductory platform for new comers in FPGA-based embedded system design which may then proceed to more advanced system design using already available Arrow’s MotionFire and EBV’s Falcon Eye Altera FPGA-based motor control development kits. Regarding devices, Altera has also made a move toward ARM-based system with their SoC FPGA and released a specific white paper for motor control using SoC FPGA. On a more educationnal side, Altera has released many publications this year intended specifically to FPGA-based motor control system designers such as 4 reasons why FPGA are right for Motor Control.

While we haven’t hear very much about Lattice in motor control / power electronics apps for a while, 2011 has been an exception with the release of a new LatticeECP3 Versa Development Kit in April. This kit is intended to be used in many computing intensive applications including Solar Panel Controllers and Data Acquisition & Control and also Video Transmission and Repeaters, Video Image Signal Processing, Camera Controllers, Network Traffic Management and Resilient Network Construction.

Motor control “apps” / subsystem IP

Over the years, this blog has published some articles explaining why the concept of “Motor Control IP/apps” - as a way to externalize/outsource motor control expertise -  is an innovative and interesting option to motor control system designers to achieve their system performance while reducing cost and time to market (read Motor Control IC vs Motor Control IP and Why FPGAs are better than DSPs for Motor Control ?). I did present a synthesis of those ideas as invited speaker at the e-Drive’s Motor, Drive & Automation System conference in San Antonio, TX, in March and the presentation has now been viewed online more than +1300 times. Those ideas are inline with the concept of “Subsystem IP” which is now perceived as a key part in “Imminent EDA Transformation“ and the ”Core of Modern Semiconductor Design“. The whole idea of an “apps-store” for embedded systems is now taking reality with the recent launch of the ARM/Avnet Embedded Software Store and also the D&R Embedded: this is probably only the beginning. Hence, ideas from only a couple years ago are definitely taking place and are changing ways to approach the difficult task of embedded system design.

What to expect in 2012?

This is always a tricky question to address but if you follow this blog regularly, you can see a momentum building toward greater adoption of FPGAs as electronic system platform for motor drive systems design and “IPs/Apps” as building blocks for motor drive system designers. Having now the major FPGA companies aligned on this market is definitely a good indicator. Regarding this blog, you may expect some change toward more content on the “IPs/Apps” side (i.e. pure motor control algorithms/software) not only oriented toward FPGA, but also toward other electronic devices on the market. More on this later in 2012…

Meanwhile, thanks for your interest and I wish you success in your power electronics system design in 2012 !

“I started this project more to gather some experience with FPGAs, rather than to design or own such a device, but it ultimately developed into a complete design, consisting of several boards.”

The design is not over complicated and it's a great example of how a simple FPGA project can turn into a useful tool for audio processing.

PyroFactor: Read

The guys from Cornell designed an interesting system that allows playing music on a paper with only fingers. The idea is simple but another talk with implementation. They took a camera to capture area where playing is performed. Then each area is divided in sectors with different instruments like keyboard, drum. FPGA has to detect finger by recognizing human skin and then determine its position.

As they say – the most challenging part of the project was detecting human skin. They escaped with pretty simple solution where normalized RGB values are analyzed. In order to get piano like music sound they used Karplus-Stron algorithm which models the behavior of string vibration. For drum signal they modeled a wave propagation on a mesh surface. They put all system in to two FPGA DE2 boards where one takes care of detecting fingers and generates piano sounds while another takes care of drum sound.

WPvideo 1.10

High-speed Electronic Product Development (EPD) with extensive design experience in turnkey product development and technical knowledge in System Design and Architecture. Electronic Product Development - Fidus Systems Some Areas of Service Include FPGA/CPLD Design DSP Design PCB Layout & Signal Integrity RF/Wireless Design Automated Identification Systems (AIS) Fidus delivers Signal Integrity (SI), Power Integrity (PI) and Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) analysis for on-chip IC...

This post is a snippet, to see the full content visit this blog or http://www.dapj.net/. The blogs are listed at dapj Web.

RSA encryption and decryption algorithm operates with prime numbers. If are familiar with RSA encryption you know that here involves two keys – public and private. In order to generate these we need a two prime numbers p, q to calculate modulus n=pq. Prime numbers are numbers that has no other divisor than 1 and itself and is greater than 1. For instance prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, …

Finding prime number is a first task that FPGA has to do. There are many algorithms that may help finding prime numbers. Cornell university students are using Rabin-Miller Strong Pseudoprime Test probabilistic algorithm that allows to test if number is prime. With large numbers like 1231164598461316549… you cant test all division variants that would take endless time. Anyway theory is way deeper here that we are capable to cover. FPGA is pretty fast to take multiple tests on number to determine prime numbers. And as you guessed these numbers are used to generate RSA keys to encode message. NiosII soft processor is used to help with encryption. They also build a VGA controller to output text for judging the results.

FPGAs provides real power to build really interesting projects like this one. By following ECE 5750 final projects we find another great solution for playing music. It’s an Air Strings. It allows to play string instrument without physical one. You only have to wave green tipped fingers in front of camera in order to activate virtual strings. They are using Karplus Strong algorithm to achieve this.

The whole trick in this is detecting finger movement. To do so, FPGA generates an image with strings while camera reads changes of RGB values on it. When finger with contrasty tip appears in to particular string area – sound is generated.

Altera is looking to put OpenCL into FPGA hardware. This could give GPUs a run for the money when it comes to accelerating parallel processing.

This article will look at how to build the same functionality that the Masochist's Video Card (built only with 7400 logic IC's) had, however this time we will use the DE0 Nano development board to complete the task, instead of wrist-breaking, pain-staking, masochist-loving wire-wrapping.

PyroFactor: Read