BittWare Anemone104 Co-Processor for FPGAs

BittWare Anemone104 Co-Processor for FPGAs

BittWare Anemone104 Co-Processor for FPGAs

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.

16 independent floating point cores
19.2 GFLOPS of floating point processing
1 Watt core power
ANSI C-programmable
IEEE Floating Point
Shared memory architecture
External I/O via memory-mapped links
Scale multiple chips up to 4.9 TFLOPS
High throughput mesh network
Standard GNU/Eclipse Development Tools
Available from BittWare on standard board formats

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