From Silicon Labs: "Programmable Clocks Simplify Board-Level FPGA Designs"

One of our timing customers sees a real opportunity in the way FPGA-based designs are commercialized and brought to market.

Jim Bittman, principal hardware engineer, founded BittWare in 1989. The company was recently acquired and today is BittWare, a Molex company, with headquarters in Concord, New Hampshire. Back in the 1990s, BittWare was focused on DSP boards—but in the early 2000s the company realized a new opportunity for growth using a new generation of powerful FPGAs. Switching from designing and manufacturing DSP-based boards to those with large FPGAs was not simple, however, as the nature of these devices brought significant engineering challenges for early adopters like BittWare.

 

FPGAs combine programmable logic, embedded high-speed transceivers, protocol IP controllers, digital signal processing, memory controllers, and a tremendous amount of computational power. FPGAs are truly the brains in modern electronic designs. But to unlock and harness the power of the industry’s latest FPGAs, system designers are faced with a formidable system integration challenge. Designs require network connectivity, high speed serial interfaces to share data across chips and boards, memory, power, timing and other resources. Designers need to develop solutions that can be brought to market quickly and efficiently. And there is also a need to develop customized solutions that are uniquely tailored for different markets and customers.

That’s where BittWare comes in. BittWare develops Intel and Xilinx board-level solutions that combine FPGAs with 10/40/100GbE high-speed networking interfaces, PCIe Gen 1, Gen 2 or Gen 3 connectivity, DDR4 memory, Silicon Labs low jitter programmable clocks and a board management controller for advanced system monitoring. The boards are based upon industry-standard commercially-off-the-shelf (COTS) form factors to ensure compatibility and interoperability with chassis and single board computer vendors. The benefit? BittWare’s customers get a turnkey solution that significantly reduces technology risk and accelerates time-to-revenue.

Another challenge is that different applications often require different frequency clocks to support different networking protocols and control plane functions. BittWare and Silicon Labs worked closely together to address this challenge by building support into BittWare’s software so that their customers can directly customize Silicon Labs’ programmable clocks for their own applications. One common hardware platform can be easily adapted to support a broad range of different applications. The hardware, including clocking, is remotely field-upgradable, so new applications can be enabled quickly via software upgrades.

A broad range of markets are benefiting from these system-level turnkey solutions, including broadcast video, finance, instrumentation, government and military/aerospace. In particular, applications like cyber security, high frequency trading, and high-performance computing in data centers require rapid reprogrammability to support innovative new features and services.

By combining Intel and Xilinx programmable FPGAs and Silicon Labs programmable clocks in their designs, BittWare is powering the next wave of innovation in high-speed electronics design.

To learn more about Silicon Labs' timing solutions, click here. 

Source: https://www.silabs.com/community/blog.entry.html/2018/08/03/programmable_clocks-WGEl