Showing posts with label I/O. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I/O. Show all posts

Monday, July 16, 2012

Programmable Systems Integration demonstrated by Xilinx at ESC India 2012

Booth demos and conference presentations highlight convergence of hardware and software in All Programmable systems enhancing flexibility, performance and design productivity as well as BOM cost and total power



Xilinx, Inc. will demonstrate its Zynq™-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP) and new Vivado Design Suite, as well as presenting two conference papers on FPGA design for software developers and System-on-Chip (SoC) integration at ESC India 2012 from July 18-20, 2012. Xilinx will show visitors how its All Programmable technologies enable flexible, scalable embedded designs for achieving increased system performance and accelerated design productivity.

Xilinx's All Programmable technologies comprise of FPGAs, 3D ICs and SoCs featuring programmable hardware, software and I/O, tightly integrated with best-in-class operating systems, IP and development tools.

What: Embedded Systems Conference India (ESC India) 2012
Where: NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore, stand C7-C8
When: July 18 - 20, 2012
Exhibits: July 18 – 20, 2012
Papers: July 20, 2012
Zynq-7000 SoC

Four  demonstrations will highlight the video, graphics and real-time processing capabilities of Xilinx's Zynq-7000 EPP; a new class of device which combines the industry-standard ARM® dual-core Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ processing system with tightly coupled programmable logic, demonstrating that this architecture offers values far beyond just component cost reduction.

The image-processing demonstration, using Linux running in SMP mode on a Zynq-7000 SoC development board, will compare a software-based approach to processing medical CAT-scan images using the dual Cortex-A9 cores, against a hardware-accelerated solution with critical functions performed in programmable logic showing an overall performance gain of over 10x on this image processing algorithm.

With Windows Embedded Compact 7 gaining traction in a wide range of small footprint enterprise and consumer devices, a demonstration based on the work by Adeneo on Zynq-7000 SoC will showcase advanced Qt graphical user framework and multimedia capabilities.

Another demonstration, featuring accelerated HD video processing, will show how the Zynq-7000 device enables a single-chip solution capable of processing a video pipeline in a way that is unachievable using a two-chip solution. Featuring a sobel filter implemented in programmable logic, this IP core is interconnected with the dual Cortex-A9 processing system. This demonstration will show how computationally intensive tasks can be offloaded seamlessly in programmable logic to maximize system performance and functionality while reducing power consumption.

The final application-focused Zynq-7000 EPP demonstration will feature the device as an asymmetric multi-processing engine using the two Cortex-A9 cores. Utilizing technology by Xilinx Alliance Program member, Petalogix, and running Linux side-by-side with FreeRTOS for tasks requiring low-latency response, this demonstration will show how comprehensive support for both open-source and commercial operating systems enables Zynq-7000 devices to fulfill a wide range of industrial applications.

Vivado Design Suite

In addition, Xilinx will showcase its Vivado Design Suite, a completely new design environment built from the ground up to accelerate design productivity, scale to support high-capacity programmable devices at 28nm and beyond, and provide features for programmable systems integration.
Xilinx will show how the Vivado Design Suite integrated design environment with its shared scalable data model facilitates a new IP centric design approach with progressive area and power estimates and cross-probing at all levels. Xilinx will also demonstrate its unique High-Level synthesis tool built on AutoESL™ tool technology, Vivado HLS, which accelerates design implementation and verification by enabling C,C++, and SystemC specifications to be directly synthesized into VHDL or Verilog RTL, after exploring a multitude of micro-architectures based on design requirements. Designers and system architects will see on the Xilinx booth a faster and more robust way of delivering quality designs.

Friday, July 6, 2012

GWT Swept under Open Source



Google is  handing over control of its GWT (Google Web Toolkit) for browser application development to a steering committee. A release candidate of GWT 2.5, the final Google-directed release, is also available and features compiler optimizations.
News of the change of leadership came at Google I/O from Ray Cromwell, the Google technical lead for GTT.
Cromwell, who will serve as the committee chairperson in the first instance, explained that with a committee controlling the future road map of GWT:
It will no longer be Google as dictator.... We have to be responsive, and we have to think more about what other people [support]," in GWT,
The other companies represented on the committee include Vaadin, Sencha, and Red Hat, and members include GWT advocates Thomas Broyer, Christian Goudreau, and Daniel Kurka.
According to Cromwell, the committee has already had a couple of meetings and has decided to move the GWT repository from Subversion to Git. GWT has also forked two official branches: a master dev line trunk, for testing out bleeding-edge capabilities, and a beta branch, which will hold new capabilities selectively taken from the dev line trunk branch.
GWT is essentially a Java-to-JavaScript compiler - a software development kit with core Java APIs and widgets for writing AJAX applications in Java and compiling them to JavaScript. It is used in Google products such as AdWords and Wallet and for "fun things" such as GwtQuake and Angry Birds for the Web.
The timeline presented at Google I/O shows that GWT 1.0 was released in 2006, had its first open source release in 2007 and reached version 2.0 in 2009 when it added major new features including DevMode, DraftCompile, UI Binder, LayoutPanel. CodeSplitter, ClientBundle, and CssResource. Versions 2.1 and 2.2 both had major features, with RequestFactory and Editor Framework in the former in 2010 and GWT Designer and HTML5 support in 2011. A few months later, Version 2.3 extended HTML5 support and improved AppEngine integration. Version 2.4 also  in 2011 had Maven and RequestFactory enhancement.
Now the last version to emerge from the Google-managed phase of the project, GWT 2.5 introduces a SuperDevMode capability that allows for fast refreshing and compiling to JavaScript and brings source-level Java debugging and mobile browser debugging.
The upgrade also includes Elemental, an experimental library providing lightweight, to-the-metal Web programming, primarily targeted at mobile development.
Other features include:
New Compiler Optimizations
Closure Compiler Integration
Code Splitter improvements
Better Stack Traces with SourceMaps
UiBinder and CellWidget updates
A final version of GWT 2.5 is expected in less than a month.

As we reported yesterday, Google has closed more of its redundant and unwanted projects and while GWT doesn't fit into either category putting it in the hands of a steering committee does seem a bit like sweeping it to one side.
On the other hand, having Google loosen it hold on the project may be just what is required for it to flourish.