BittWare Joins Altera Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL

The S5PH-Q is a half-length PCIe card based on Altera's high-performance 28-nm Stratix® V FPGAs, providing a versatile and efficient solution for high-performance network processing, signal processing and data acquisition. BittWare is offering the S5PH-Q as part of their OpenCL Developer's Bundle. The BittWare OpenCL Developer's bundle provides users the highest quality out-of-box development environment based on Altera hardware, FPGA development tools, and peripheral hardware and software.

BittWare has been working diligently with Altera to provide an optimized, fully-tested, deployable Stratix V FPGA-based COTS board that is supported by the Altera SDK for OpenCL, said Darren Taylor, BittWare Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Marketing. We are pleased to be a part of Altera's Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL, giving us the ability to offer our customers a validated COTS PCI Express board complete with an OpenCL programming environment.

Altera and BittWare continue to work together to deliver high-end, FPGA board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk and time-to-market for our mutual customers, said Alex Grbic, director of software, DSP and IP marketing at Altera. BittWare has consistently leveraged the latest technology from Altera, which now includes an SDK for OpenCL, to dramatically reduce the design complexity for applications in the computing, financial and military markets.

BittWare's press release follows Altera's announcement today in regards to their Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL:Altera Opens the World of FPGAs to Software Programmers with Broad Availability of SDK and Off-the-Shelf Boards for OpenCL.

Benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs:

• Faster time-to-market using the OpenCL C-based parallel programming language as opposed to low-level hardware description language.
• Quick design exploration by working at a higher level of design abstraction.
• Easy design re-use by re-targeting existing OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs.
• Faster design completion by generating an FPGA implementation of OpenCL C code in a single step, bypassing the manual timing closure efforts and implementation of communication interfaces between the FPGA, host, and external memories.
• Increased performance by offloading performance-intensive functions from the host processor to the FPGA
• Significantly lower power by using the Altera SDK for OpenCL which generates only the logic needed to deliver the required application

BittWare's OpenCL Developer's Bundle Includes:

• BittWare S5-PCI-HQ Altera Stratix V GSMD5 half-length PCIe board with two banks of 4GByte DDR3 SDRAM
• S5PH-Q Board Support Package
• BittWare BittWorks II Toolkit application development software for BittWare COTS boards
• BittWare Breakout Board providing front panel access to signals and interfaces on the S5PH-Q (two RS-232 connectors, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, and a micro-USB shell that are all accessible via the front panel)
• One year license for the Altera Quartus II software, Developer's Kit Edition
• One year license for the Altera SDK for OpenCL
• Altera USB Byte Blaster to download configuration or program data into the Stratix V