原创 BEEcube转向前端设计

It wasn’t that surprising to see BEEcube announce on May 18 that it would be taking its new FPGA prototyping engine to next month’s Design Automation Conference in San Diego. I met with the company’s senior vice president of marketing and business development, Joseph Rothman, at the Embedded Systems Conference, and it’s pretty obvious how heavily BEEcube is playing to the front-end design and development community.

Also evident is BEEcube’s desire to take maximum advantage of its whimsical name. The company was spun from the UC Berkeley Emulation Engine project (hence, BEE), and was originally targeting its expandable board-level architecture, based on Xilinx Virtex platforms, at high-performance computing and system-level simulation tasks (http://www.fpgagurus.edn.com/blog/fpga-gurus-blog/berkeley-emulation-engine-update). But many companies have seen the virtue of using FPGAs for FPGA prototyping, and BEEcube is following the trend.

New marketing material refers to the “Honeycomb” architecture of symmetrical-multiprocessing high-availability FPGA clusters; to the “Nectar” distributed OS, a specialized C-based OS allowing real-time debugging; and to the “Sting” I/O, ready-configured IP for Gigabit Ethernet, 10G Serdes blocks, and interfaces to A/D and D/A modules. I suggested to Rothman that it might be possible to bring “killer bee” references to the marketing program, but haven’t noticed any results so far.

Anyway, the system shown initially at ESC, which will be spotlighted at DAC, is BEE4-W, designed for mixed-signal applications such as the signal acquisition work found in radar, software-defined radio, MIMO base stations, and signals intelligence. BEEcube married four Virtex-6 FPGAs in a ring bus topology with DDR3 memory, and added DAC/ADC modules in FMC mezzanine form factors. The intention is not to compete with the likes of Pentek or Mercury Computer Systems, but to allow for rapid prototyping of signal-acquisition platforms based on FPGAs. What’s fascinating (and maybe not accidental) is that the intelligence agencies have been talking in recent years about “emergent intelligence” arising out of the so-called “hive mind” of distributed signal platforms. This sort of fits a company with bees in its name and a hive of buzzing brains.

In fact, what is really evident is that BEEcube has moved out of the academic mindset that characterized its early days in the compute-cluster community. The employees are having fun with all this new market development that takes advantage of the unique name. Over the next year we are bound to see references to queen bees, worker bees, and swarming interest in FPGA prototyping. Of course, the band Wilco has given us reference to a muzzle of bees, though I doubt anyone will be muzzling BEEcube in the near future.

原文：The Hive Mind Moves to Front-End Design