Customer Success - Applied Signal  

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Applied Signal Technology designs, develops, manufactures and markets advanced digital signal processing equipment to collect and process a wide range of telecommunication signals for signal reconnaissance and industrial applications. For the past 15 years, Applied Signal Technology has been designing, developing and manufacturing state of the art signal processing equipment used by the United States government.  According to Sean Caffee, a design engineer at Applied Signal, "we make a variety of equipment including IF, RF, processing equipment, voice grade channel processors, mobile radio signal processing systems and wide band digital signal processors.  Our designs are used in a wide variety of telecom applications, including cellular, modems and fax, digital microwave radio, satellite communications and digital TV.  All of this equipment is characterized by a high degree of integration, fast algorithmic processing, and an extreme amount of flexibility.    Where does Xilinx and Virtex fit into all of this?  We’ve been using Xilinx FPGAs almost from our beginnings due to their flexibility and design risk reduction.  However, prior to Virtex, these older FPGAs were not generally fast enough or dense enough for all of our applications.  So we had to resort to designing costly ASICs and gate arrays for specialized digital signal processing applications.  These older FPGAs were generally relegated to doing smaller, slower specialized functions.  We are currently completing a project were each of our advanced demodulator ASIC designs was enhanced, converted to generic VHDL and ported to a Virtex XCV1000.  Virtex has the density, speed and system level features like block RAM and DLLs that make it competitive with ASIC technology. 

We’ve been working with Virtex for more than a year and a half now and are consistently amazed at how much we can pack into a Virtex device and just how fast the tools work.  They are making the timing requirements consistently and that wasn’t always true in the past.  We are currently designing a general purpose processing board that will incorporate these designs using V1000s or even V2000Es.  Because we are using Virtex FPGAs instead of ASICs, we can download new designs to the FPGAs thus allowing the board to perform new and/or different processing scenarios.  It is this flexibility that is so important to us and our government customers because it eliminates the high NRE costs and the long time to market associated with ASIC and new board development for new processing scenarios. Once we get the board into full production, we expect to sell several hundred a year.  This is not a huge quantity for commercial companies but it represents a fairly substantial quantity from our business area. Applied Signal Technology has been very happy with the Virtex FPGA so far.  It has allowed us to expand our product line and continue to offer extremely flexible, quick turn products to our customers at the lowest possible price.  We have enjoyed fantastic technical and marketing support from Xilinx and hope to continue with this close relationship. 

We have several designs going right now but in the largest one we are hitting about 75% of a V1000.  But prior to optimizing one of the designs, it came down to more like a 68% utilization.  We actually had one time where we placed and routed a 99.9% utilized V1000 and we were quite impressed with that.  Just the fact that basically if it fit in the device it was routable and we got our timing out of it also. 

Regarding the M2.1 tools, I just got a copy of that tool set and so I’ve run some of the old designs through that just to sort of baseline it and benchmark 2.1 tools and have seen excellent performance out of those.  In one of the designs were doing, it’s one of these designs where you can kind of double the complexity of it fairly simply.  So I did that and ran it in a V2000E, place divided it for that part and got 96% utilization out of a V2000E.  Obviously it’s a part that has not hit the street yet but we’re already looking at targeting that. 

For more information on Applied Signal, visit their web site at http://www.appsig.com.
 

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