GDA Technologies, Inc. Partners with the California Institute of Technology to Develop a Wide Bandwidth Multi-channel Extendable Digital Correlator System.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 28, 1999--

GDA Technologies, Inc., a fast growing supplier of turnkey hardware design services today announced that it has partnered with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to develop a wide bandwidth, multi-channel, digital Correlator System.

The Correlator System uses the industry standard PCI bus and compact PCI (cPCI) form factor. The Correlator design integrates several of GDA's re-useable IPs such as PCI bus-to-DSP bus, SDRAM controller and DSP-to-peripheral interface functions.

The Correlator System is to be a major component in Caltech's Owens Valley Radio Observatory. The Correlator System consists of two highly complex cPCI boards; the Digitizer boards and the Correlator boards. The Digitizer boards in the system convert wide bandwidth RF input signals into digital data that is transmitted to and processed by the Correlator boards.

The Digitizer board is a modular design with a cPCI baseboard and a user defined plug-in module board. The baseboard contains the user programmed FPGAs, PCI interface, DSP, RAM and system controller, while the plug-in module currently contains two 1GHz digitizers. The modular design allows easy upgrade of the digitizers, or modification for other project requirements. The digitizer modules are designed to sample 500MHz bandwidth input signals at a clock rate of 1GHz to 2-bits and then time multiplex this data to a 32-bit data stream at 62.5MHz or a 16-bit data stream at 125MHz. A phase locked loop (PLL) with a programmable reference delay is used to generate the 1GHz digitizer clock frequency. The programmable delay is used to synchronize each of the clocks on the Digitizer and Correlator boards in the system to within picoseconds. A high speed 33.3 MFLOPS DSP is used for real-time control on the baseboard. The user programmed FPGAs are used to monitor the digitizer's operation by performing calculations on the 32-bit data stream and to distribute data to front panel LVDS transceivers for transmission of data to the Correlator boards. The re-programmable nature of these FPGAs allows a great deal of flexibility in system re-design and upgrade.

The Correlator board is a high speed compact PCI based highly complex board for computing the cross power spectrum between the telescope data received over the front-panel LVDS transceiver interface. An array of ten Altera 100KA FPGAs (upgradable to faster 100KEs or denser 250KA/KEs) is used to perform computation of cross correlation function at a speed of 62.5MHz (potentially 125MHz). A high speed 33.3 MFLOPS DSP is used to read the cross correlation estimates from the array of FPGAs, for computing the cross power spectra using the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), and also for real time control. GDA's 33MHz PCI target core is used for the transfer of data to the host over PCI bus. GDA's DSP core logic IP and SDRAM controller IP are implemented in a single FPGA to achieve the Compact PCI form factor. Phase-lock clocking techniques ensure the synchronization of the ten FPGAs on each Correlator board, and between separate Correlator boards.

While the development of the Correlator system is a joint project with Caltech, GDA retains the commercial right for the development of this system. GDA plans to manufacture these boards on an OEM basis for several vertical applications such as Digital Filters, FPGA and ASIC prototyping, and Global Positioning Systems (GPS).

GDA performed the RTL design, verification, FPGA synthesis, and implementation targeting Altera Flex100 K devices. GDA also performed the full board design including logic design, schematic entry, board layout, design debug, documentation, and board bring-up.

"This project provided us a unique opportunity work with a premier educational institution to develop a highly complex cPCI system. This project demonstrates the depth of skills within GDA in IP, IC and Board design services. GDA engineers overcame the challenges posed by the clocking scheme with ECL and CMOS and LVDS buffering related issues. The use of existing GDA cores allowed us to reduce the overall development time of the project." said A.G.Karunakaran "AGK", President of GDA Technologies, Inc.

"Caltech chose GDA Technologies because of their proven strength in a variety of areas such as high performance board designs along with their capabilities for re-useable IP development and integration in ASICs and FPGAs. This partnership with GDA technologies enabled Caltech to focus on software architecture and development issues while making use of GDA's industrial design experience in developing this complex and manufacturable hardware system" said Dave Hawkins, Senior Scientist at the California Institute of Technology's Owens Valley Radio Observatory.

GDA Technologies' Application Specific Design Services portfolio includes product development for PC, Networking and Consumer market segments. GDA has developed CPU engines for Routers, Switches and Firewalls for the networking markets based on x86, StrongARM, PowerPC and MIPS processors. In the consumer market, GDA has developed Digital Video products such as MPEG2 decoders, Internet appliances such as Web Telephone and Network Computers.

About GDA Technologies

GDA Technologies is a premier design house located in Silicon Valley. GDA was established to be a product development partner for companies in the Computer, Networking and Consumer industries. They focus on designing Boards, SOCs, ASICs, FPGAs and IPs from concept to product. GDA has a satellite design center at Chennai, India. The GDA web site is www.gdatech.com.

About Caltech

The California Institute of Technology's Owens Valley Radio Observatory operates one of the world's finest radio interferometers. The interferometer is composed of six 10m diameter telescopes, each with a surface accuracy of less than half a human hair. The accurate surfaces on the 10m dishes allow the observation of molecular transitions that can be observed as radio emissions at millimeter wavelengths. The detection and processing of these molecular transitions allows the mapping of galaxies, molecular clouds, clusters of galaxies, planets, comets, and numerous other sources of radio emissions. These maps provide fundamental information on the formation, structure, chemistry, dynamics, and age of the universe we live in.