CommAgility and PolyCore Software Collaborate to speed Multicore Development on TI DSPs

Poly-Platform is a collection of productivity tools and runtime communications engine, which PSI plans to port to several of CommAgility’s AdvancedMC modules. Using a friendly GUI, Poly-Platform cuts development time and cost for migrating applications to, and developing applications for, multicore platforms. Poly-Platform also provides tools to optimise run-time performance, enabling designers to get the most from TI’s multicore DSPs.

The first board supported will be the CommAgility AMC-2C6678 module, a high performance signal processing card that provides two fixed and floating-point TMS320C6678 DSPs from TI, each with eight 1.25GHz C66x cores. The AMC-2C6678 also includes a Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA and a fast, flexible range of I/O with Gigabit Ethernet and Serial RapidIO.

“For engineers looking to harness the power of TI’s KeyStone architecture and C66x multicore DSPs, the combination of CommAgility’s hardware and PSI’s software provide a way to further optimize and enhance their programming experience,” said Ramesh Kumar, business manager, multicore processors, TI. “We are excited about this collaboration between PolyCore Software and CommAgility, as well as the ease of programming benefits our customers should enjoy as a result.”

As well as multiple cores on one board, the Poly-Platform also provides support for more than one AMC-2C6678 module in a system. The module’s IDT CPS-1848 Gen2 SRIO switch provides a 20Gbps per port Serial RapidIO infrastructure, which enables fast data transfer between DSPs and the FPGA – both on-board and off-board between multiple modules.

The collaboration between PSI and CommAgility is aimed at applications that require the high levels of performance provided by multicore DSPs, across sectors including telecoms, networking, medical and military/aerospace.

Support is also planned for new CommAgility boards to be announced later in 2012, which will include multiple TI TMS320C6678 DSPs. These boards will significantly improve the DSP core count compared to CommAgility’s existing AMC modules.