原创 Tiny FPGAs for honking-big workstations

I don't know if I've mentioned this here on Embedded.com, but the Pleasure Dome (my office) is located in a building owned by an engineering company called MaxVision (no relation).

 

The folks at MaxVision specialize in creating awesome, rugged, transportable computers. Take their MaxPac 8261 XL Dual Xeon Modular Multi-Screen Workstation Family. You can configure these in all sorts of ways; for example, you can go up to 18 processor cores in each Xeon, which gives you 36 processor cores total. Furthermore, these little rascals are hyper-threaded, which means you can have two active threads per core, or 72 active threads total. Couple this with up to half a terabyte of main memory, and you can see why I refer to these beauties as "honking-big workstations."

 

I have to tell you that I love these beasts. This is just the sort of thing you need if you have to do a lot of high-end graphics and compute-intensive work -- like video editing and production -- away from your home base. They also find a lot of use for applications like controlling unmanned air vehicles in hostile environments (they are rated for 0°C to 50°C operation with air filters that will work in a sandstorm). They also come with two, four, six, or even ten 24" 1920x1200 screens, with touch screens as an option.

 

But we digress... The reason I'm waffling on about this here is that I was just chatting with an engineer who only recently joined the MaxVision team. We were in the kitchen grabbing a coffee. When our conversation turned to programmable logic, he asked if I'd ever heard of the GPAK devices from Silego.

 

I think this engineer (who shall remain nameless) was hoping to surprise me with something new, but the tables were turned when I started spouting factoids at him. As I mentioned in my original column:

The most recent addition to the GPAK family is the GPAK4, and the first member of this fourth generation is the SLG46620V. Presented in a 20-pin STQFN package (2.0 x 3.0 x 0.55mm with an 0.4mm pitch) and supporting a supply voltage of 1.8V to 5.0V, this little rascal boasts 18 general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs), 6 analog comparators ACMPs, 3 digital comparators/pulse-width modulators DCMPs/PWMs, 2 digital-to-analog converters (DACs), 25 lookup tables (LUTs), and a variety of counter, delay, and flip-flop macrocells.

 

I think I impressed him with my off-the-cuff knowledge -- it all adds to "The Mystery that is Max" (LOL). It turns out that the folks at MaxVision have started to use these tiny GPAKs to provide a vital function in their hairiest of hairy workstations, but I'm not at liberty to say more.

 

I asked the engineer how he'd come to hear about GPAKs in the first place.

 

Our conversation was drawing to a close when he said: "Funnily enough, there was a comment from a guy called Max." I didn’t respond -- I just stood there looking at him until his eyes told me that he was having a little "D'oh" moment (LOL).