Achronix Semiconductor Corporation

Designers of test and instrumentation systems work in an especially demanding environment. By the very nature of their mission, such systems must be at the vanguard of performance and accuracy.  Thus they are in special need of high performance, and the Achronix Speedster^® FPGA family delivers that performance across the board:

• Fast reprogrammable logic (1.5 GHz)
• Fast embedded memory (850 MHz)
• Fast multipliers (1.5 GHz)
• Fast I/Os (up to 1.066 Gbps)
• Fast SerDes (up to 10.375 Gbps)

Test and instrumentation systems perform measurements and characterization, and thus must match, or even exceed, the performance level of the systems or devices under test. Test and instrumentation systems include:

• Oscilloscopes
• Spectrum analyzers
• Bit error rate testers
• Data acquisition systems
• Waveform generators
• Protocol analyzers
• Semiconductor Test Equipment (ATE)

Today’s systems operate on real-time digital information, either exchanged digitally with the object under test, or through digital/analog conversion. The operations involved depend on the type of measurement or characterization being performed, and include:

• Sampling and storage
• Filtering
• Correlation and convolution
• Pseudo-random sequence generation and comparison
• Pattern recognition

In today’s high-end systems these operations must be performed at very high rates. At the same time, they must be highly configurable. For these reasons, an ultra-high-performance reprogrammable device is the ideal platform for the test and instrumentation world. Until now, reprogrammable devices (FPGAs) have been constrained to modest performance levels (500 MHz and below). Now the Speedster family from Achronix Semiconductor is available, offering a reprogrammable logic fabric operating at rates up to 1.5 GHz.

In addition to its unprecedented fabric speed, Speedster offers the most advanced I/O capabilities available from an FPGA. For example, the programmable I/Os (together with the fabric performance level) give Speedster the unique ability to attach directly to today’s high-speed ADCs, and process digitized waveforms at their native rate (1.5 GHz). As another example, Speedster devices have SerDes lanes operating at 10.3 Gbps, allowing direct connection to 10 Gbps ports, for testing of networking, telecommunication, and storage links and protocols.

For state-of-the-art test and instrumentation applications, Speedster provides the best reprogrammable platform for system development.