Avnet, MathWorks, TI and Xilinx deliver workshops on co-processing design solutions

PHOENIX, USA: Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a business region of Avnet Inc., along with MathWorks, Texas Instruments (TI) and Xilinx is offering a new series of SpeedWay Design Workshops focusing on designing co-processing solutions with TI’s DSP + ARM OMAP-L138 processors, Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGAs and MathWorks Simulink Model-Based design tools.

These workshops are being offered to design engineers beginning in February 2011, and will take place in locations throughout North America. Each workshop is $695 per attendee and covers the full three days of lectures, labs and meals. Registration is open now at http://www.em.avnet.com/coprocessing2011.

“The growing demand for high performance processing and flexible interfaces is driving an increased interest in new FPGA-based co-processing architectures,” said Jim Beneke, vice president of global technical marketing at Avnet Electronics Marketing.

“Engineers will leave this advanced workshop with new ways to optimize system performance and address the significant system-level challenges that are presented when incorporating FPGA-based solutions with DSPs.”

Engineers from Avnet and MathWorks will present during the three-day, hands-on workshops with topics covering design and development flow for ARM, DSP and FPGA, with labs focusing on video and image processing. Course materials and lab work will be based on the newly released Avnet Spartan-6 FPGA/OMAP-L138 Co-Processing DSP Kit.

Attendees will receive a $400 discount coupon for the newly released Avnet Spartan-6 FPGA/OMAP-L138 Co-Processing DSP Kit, as well as a 50 percent discount for TI’s TMDXOSKL138BET evaluation module ($849 value). Coupons for the discounts will be distributed at the event to registered customers.

“The dual core system in TI’s DSP + ARM OMAP-L138 processor offer developers processing efficiency by allowing the ARM to support complex operating systems and the floating/fixed point DSP to handle high-precision digital signal processing,” said Joy Ji, OMAP-L138 marketing manager, TI.

“Attendees to the SpeedWay Design Workshops will learn more about TI’s DSP + ARM OMAP-L138 processor and get a first look at its solutions on the Avnet Spartan-6 FPGA/OMAP-L138 Co-Processing DSP Kit.

“Xilinx has seen a dramatic increase in the use of programmable logic with embedded systems to accelerate performance and expand peripherals. The challenge has been to optimize the key strengths of high performance FPGAs, system control processing and digital signal processing in one integrated solution,” says Tom Hill, senior manager, DSP Platforms Marketing at Xilinx. “These SpeedWay workshops demystify design flow by starting with a real-world reference design that can easily be customized by end users to meet their own unique requirements.”

“Thousands of engineers are using Model-Based Design with MathWorks Simulink and Embedded Coder technology to implement algorithms on advanced microcontrollers and DSPs,” said Amnon Gai, manager in MathWorks Partner Programs and Corporate Development team.

“Adding FPGA for co-processing addresses the need for today’s increased performance. Attendees will learn ways to utilize Model-Based Design to unify the simulation, implementation and verification of complex system-level design concepts based on Avnet’s embedded platforms.”