Anemone Co-Processor for FPGAs

Overview

BittWare Anemone Co-Processor for FPGAs Low-Power, C-Programmable, Floating Point. A New Approach to Floating Point DSP: The BittWare Anemone, featuring the Epiphany architecture from Adapteva, enables the best assets of traditional floating point DSPs and FPGAs to be combined, thereby offering a completely new approach to floating point digital signal processing. BittWare's Anemone is a completely scalable, up to 750MHz multicore processor with 16 eCores that provide a total sustained performance of 32 GFLOPS while consuming only 1 Watt of total chip power.

Features

• 16 independent floating point cores
• 32 GFLOPS of floating point processing
• 2 Watts total chip power
• ANSI C-programmable
• IEEE Floating Point
• Shared memory architecture
• External I/O via memory-mapped links
• Scale multiple chips up to 8 TFLOPS
• High throughput mesh network
• Standard GNU/Eclipse Development Tools
• Available from BittWare on standard board formats

Specifications

Traditional floating point DSPs, while excellent at complex processing tasks, have limitations when it comes to chip real estate and power efficiency that have caused them to become an endangered species. And FPGAs, while superior for versatility and configurability, can be difficult to use for complex and evolving applications. The BittWare Anemone, featuring the Epiphany architecture from Adapteva, enables the best assets of both to be combined, thereby offering a completely new approach to floating point digital signal processing. This hybrid solution provides a standard processor software development environment working in conjunction with a world-class FPGA platform, allowing users to optimally partition their algorithms into hardware and software. The result is superior development productivity and unmatched system size, weight, and power.

Anemone is a truly C-programmable floating point compute engine. It is unique in that it achieves superior power efficiency and processing performance because it is designed to work alongside an FPGA as a co-processor. The FPGA handles all the memory, I/O interfacing, protocol processing, and special functions in addition to any computational tasks it may perform, leaving the Anemone free to efficiently perform the complex processing tasks that DSPs are ideal for. This allows Anemone to be an extremely efficient chip - as compared with traditional floating point DSPs that may only use 5% of the silicon area for processing.

The BittWare Anemone is a completely scalable 1 GHz multicore processor with 16 eCores that provide a total sustained performance of 32 GFLOPS while consuming only 2 Watts of total chip power. Each eCore features a compact, general-purpose instruction set that requires no instruction level parallelism and provides high program efficiency. All floating point computations are performed as single-precision IEEE 754; hardware looping is also supported. Anemone offers distributed and segmented memory, and large uniform register files.

Ordering Information

Please contact Sarsen Technology for full details of the BittWare Anemone Co-processor for FPGAs.