Digital Video Platform Gets Helping Hand from Simulink HDL Coder from Mathworks

The DVIP from Sundance has been developed for the highest performance in high-definition broadcast systems or high-resolution image processing for medical applications. Such video processing applications have become a perfect target for manufacturers like Xilinx who make re-configurable devices (FPGAs).

The smallest of the family of DVIPs has no less than three Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGAs and sports in the region of 15 million spare gates for users to program with their own algorithms. The biggest issue in using these devices was the lack of suitable tools that were designed for software scientists, and not hardware engineers. Another issue was simulation and portability. Simulink HDL Coder and The MathWorks model-based design tools have removed those barriers. They have also been incorporated into 3L’s Diamond suite of multiprocessor tools, allowing ‘Tasks’ to be placed on combinations of DSPs and FPGAs.

“Now, engineers can implement digital video applications on the Sundance FPGA/DSP using Simulink Models,” says Ken Karnofsky, marketing director, signal processing and communications, at The MathWorks. Ken continues, “The DVIP simplifies hardware implementation by providing a platform that combines Texas Instruments DSPs and Xilinx FPGA processing.”

“Our customers have struggled for years with getting FPGAs to be really useful as a processing machine,” says Emmanuel Puillet, FPGA manager of Sundance Multiprocessor Technology, “Simulink HDL-Coder combined with DVIP will make porting applications much more predictable as our customers would have simulated and verified the processing using The MathWorks tools before targeting our hardware.”

The ‘glue-middleware’ that combines Sundance’s hardware and The MathWorks tools is developed by the long-established Scottish company 3L Ltd. Hendri Veldman, 3L software director, said, “It took one dedicated FPGA firmware engineers less than two days to learn all about The MathWorks’s tools and within the following day we had Simulink HDL-Coder generating applications running on Sundance’s hardware using Diamond FPGA. It was impressive.”