June 11, 2004
Announcing SBC6713e, Ethernet-Enabled Stand-Alone DSP board with User-Configurable FPGA and Choice of Analog I/O
The new SBC16713e is a high-performance, flexible, stand-alone DSP + FPGA board with 10/100 Ethernet connectivity and loaded with I/O peripherals, ready for OEM system integration. Built around the powerful, C-friendly, 225MHz floating point C6713 DSP (300MHz soon available), it is a fully open platform with 15+ OMNIBUS off-the-shelf daughter cards providing a wide choice of A/D and D/A and also supporting simple EMIF bus interface to custom I/O daughter cards. System-level integration is facilitated with on-board digital IO, high resolution DDS timebase, external clock input, multi-card sync, FIFOPort data link, flash ROM and watchdog. One Spartan-IIE FPGA of up to 600 Kgates is available for implementing custom logic interfaces or hardware accelerated signal processing. In the footsteps of the popular SBC6711, the SBC6713e provides about 10X higher bandwidth to/from host PC along with the capability to be remotely controlled via Ethernet. The TCP/IP stack runs on another DSP to preserve the C6713 for user-code and peripheral controls. In a compact 160mmx100mm 3U form factor, SBC6713e is the prime choice for high-end embedded control, remote data acquisition, industrial real-time sub-systems and sophisticated OEM instrumentation.
SBC6713e Feature Set Improvements over SBC6711:
- 10/100 Ethernet port replaces USB1.2
- Data transfer capacity to/from PC increased by about 10X
- Faster DSP with 225MHz C6713 (300MHz soon)
- 4X larger on-chip memory with 256kB L1/L2/Unified RAM
- 4X larger SDRAM with 128MB
- Optional user-configurable Spartan-IIE FPGA up to 600K gates
SBC6711-Pismo Toolset Released, Reaps Benefits of DSP/BIOS
SBC6711-Pismo release 1.01 is available on our Software Download web page and BIOS drivers are provided for the following Omnibus modules: A4D4, A4D1, Servo16, RF/CF, AD40, SD16. Other modules and the real-time servo-control device driver will be supported in future releases.
Pismo is a software suite that allows the developer to fully exploit the advanced hardware features of the SBC6711 and to reap all the benefits from DSP/BIOS. Every board peripheral and numerous Omnibus modules have been carefully integrated into this operating system and its functionality encapsulated in a device driver that can readily be controlled within DSP/BIOS applications.
These drivers expose all the necessary parameters needed to efficiently control each function of the peripherals. Any peripheral board resource may be instantiated, configured and shared among program tasks. The device drivers also take care of assigning default values for unspecified or non-critical parameters of a function. C++ is used as the foundation for the Pismo libraries, but C programmers may use Pismo freely, without having to learn C++ details or C++ extensions to the C language. The C++ libraries provided in Pismo are far more capable, complete and easy-to-use than any previous generation of DSP peripheral support libraries from Innovative Integration.
Illustrative, real-time example programs are included in the software suite along with complete project files and DSP/BIOS modules. The examples act as a springboard for the development of custom, high-performance DSP application programs.
DSP/BIOS is a powerful, dedicated real-time operating system than runs directly on all the C6000 chip to manage all DSP resources, including tasks (threads), peripherals and devices. DSP/BIOS is provided within Texas Instruments' Code Composer Studio and applications built atop DSP/BIOS may be deployed royalty-free. The Pismo Toolset relies on and extensively exploits the features of DSP/BIOS. Creating DSP applications running in the absence of DSP/BIOS is not supported with Pismo.
Note that the SBC6711 firmware MUST be updated in order to use this software release. A simple applet is provided to perform this update.
Real-Time Solution - Pathfinder Energy Services provides real-time data logging in oil-drilling rigs
Pathfinder Energy Services (www. pathfinderlwd.com) develops and manufactures drilling tools and services for oil drilling companies. Their expertise is the integration of precision instruments within drilling tools, integration and operation of turnkey systems to gather well directional data as well as rock density and composition, while drilling. These operations are referred as MWD (Measurement While Drilling) and LWD (Logging While Drilling).
The drilling rig is a long, modular tubular assembly with a rotary-driven drill bit at the end. From the surface, a mud pump constantly forces a water- or oil-based mud mixture down the drill tube, to lubricate/cool the drill bit and evacuate rock debris up by circulating the mud upward to the surface. The same fluid can be used as a transmission medium for high-pressure hydraulic pulses sent from down-hole to the top.
Innovative Integration's M67 DSP board with A16D2 and custom daughter card receives and analyses the data encoded in the pulse trains. The system provides real-time data on drill well geographical orientation and rock formation and data is used to optimize drill parameters, steer the tool and optimize maintenance.
