Agilent's FPGA kit for advanced sys design is supported by Mentor's software

Agilent Technologies has introduced the U5340A FPGA development kit, powered by a custom Mentor Graphics design engine, for high-speed digitizers.

Customers can develop advanced real-time signal processing into the FPGAs using this kit U5340A leveraging the power of high speed and highly integrated FPGAs. Applications such as medical imaging, environmental monitoring, time-of-flight spectroscopy and radar can be designed easier, according to Agilent.

The custom Mentor Graphics design engine-including HDL Author, ModelSim PE and Precision Synthesis-is embedded in the development kit to support the design, synthesis, simulation and validation of signal-processing algorithms. Place-and-route and a bitfile-generation engines are included, also providing debugging capabilities.

FPGA development kit also includes the following elements: a library of building blocks, from basic gates to dual-port RAM memories; a set of IP cores; and ready-to-use scripts that handle all aspects of the automated build flow. A full-speed design example and companion software ensure efficient system integration.

All cores are based on the AMBA AXI4 standard. The FPGA development kit also embeds complete calibration capabilities.

"Agilent has been a long-time Mentor Graphics customer and has helped shape our FPGA development tools over the years," said Valerie Rachko, marketing director for Mentor HDL and ESL design creation tools. "It was a natural choice for Agilent to select our creation, simulation and synthesis solutions for their customers in their new FPGA development kit."

"Our close partnership with Mentor Graphics enabled us to create today's most powerful FPGA development kit for high-speed digitizers," said Didier Lavanchy, operation manager for Agilent's high-speed digitizers group. "We have used the kit to design firmware options currently available in our products, and beta customers have successfully implemented a variety of algorithms. For them and us, the U5340A has significantly reduced development time and, for the first time, made possible multi-gigasample-per-second real-time processing."

More information on the U5340A is available at www.agilent.com/find/u5340a.