Next-generation, complex electronic defense systems often need multiple compute nodes. These are being supplied by multicore processors or by general-purpose processors in combination with FPGAs and/or DSPs.
A wide variety of processor types is available for military applications. The use of a decision model can help narrow the choices for a given application type.
The ability to leverage partial reconfiguration for programmable logic opens new doors to a whole host of applications such as software defined radio, dynamic instruction set computing and automatic target recognition.
The costs, development times and risks of ASIC designs have become all but prohibitive. Finalizing a design on an FPGA and moving it to a structured ASIC can cut cost, time and risk as well as result in smaller size and lower power consumption.
Support for real-time FPGA networks is emerging from board level vendors. As larger FPGAs and solutions that are more sophisticated are required, this will become increasingly important.
For FPGA-based designs today, the spectrum of IP available on the market, common implementations in industry and fine tuning with technologies under the hood make leveraging IP a strong consideration.
The right FPGA design toolkits not only speed development, but can simplify the addition of custom IP so designs can be tailored to specific applications.
FPDP has proven itself as an effective solution for high-throughput, point-to-point data movement. Meanwhile, serial FPDP offers a way to overcome the distance limits of its parallel FPDP predecessor.
