BOSTON, MA – March 27, 2007 – BittWare, Inc., the leading supplier of hybrid (FPGA and DSP) board-level solutions based on Altera's FPGA technology, announced today at the Military Technologies Conference the First Customer Shipment (FCS) of their ruggedized GT-3U-cPCI (GT3U) board. The board has shipped to Northrop Grumman for use in a soon to be announced program. The GT-3U-cPCI is the first board in BittWare's line of hybrid embedded solutions which feature one or more Altera Stratix II GX FPGAs, multiple ADSP-TS201S TigerSHARC® DSPs from Analog Devices, and a large amount of on-board memory. This conduction-cooled board is optimized for high-end, multi-processing applications while also enabling complete flexibility for future adaptability via the Altera FPGA.

"BittWare was selected for their processing power in a small package," says Allan Krueger, Principal Integration Engineer, Northrop Grumman Corporation, "but we have been especially pleased with their delivery schedule and follow-on support."

“The GT3U combines the best in class floating point DSPs with Altera's Stratix II GX FPGA technology to provide optimal flexibility and processing power for commercial and extreme environment applications,” stated Darren Taylor, Senior VP of Sales & Marketing at BittWare.

“We are extremely pleased to see Northrop Grumman utilize the GT3U in one of their upcoming products.”

The GT3U uses BittWare's ATLANTiS framework to interface between the FPGA and DSPs. Implemented in the FPGA, ATLANTiS provides a single solution for the three dilemmas facing multi-processor designs: how to allocate the I/O bandwidth among the processors, how to easily connect the various I/OS to any and all processing resources, and how to integrate FPGA and DSP processing. By implementing ATLANTiS in the Stratix II GX FPGA, BittWare solves all of the above dilemmas with 1 GByte per second of continuous throughput and leaves ample FPGA resources for additional processing.

About the GT-3U-cPCI

A processing cluster consisting of four ADSP-TS201 DSPs provides 14.4 GFLOPS of floating-point and 57.5 BOPS of 16-bit fixed-point processing power per board. The Altera Stratix II GX FPGA provides pre-, post-, or co-processing to complement the DSP cluster, while also enabling seamless routing of the TigerSHARC I/O, and simultaneous on-board and off-board data transfers at a rate of 1 GByte per second via the ATLANTiS framework.

The GT3U also supports memory modules of up to 1 GByte of DDR2 SDRAM. The front panel supplies four channels of high-speed SerDes transceivers which can be configured in ATLANTiS to support a variety of I/O protocols including Aurora, SerialLite, Serial Rapid I/O, and PCI Express™. The back panel supplies 10/100 Ethernet, RS-422, and 34 LVDS signal pairs comprised of 16 inputs and 20 outputs.

A BittWare FINe bridge chip provides the interface between the processing cluster and the DSPs, giving them low-overhead access to the host via the 32-bit, 66 MHz PCI interface. The chip also supports 10/100 ethernet on the back panel. Conversely, the FINe provides host access to the DSPs, on-board SDRAM, flash, and FPGA control registers.

Complete Development Support

BittWare offers a complete suite of development tools to make developing and debugging applications for the GT3U easy and efficient. The BittWorks software tools provide host interface libraries, a wide variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools, and debug tools. This tool set is comprised of BittWare's DSP21k Toolkit, DSP21k Porting Kit, BittWare Target, TigerSHARC BSP for Gedae, and TS-Lib and SpeedDSP libraries, as well as BittWare's multiprocessing operating environment – Trident.

Availability

The FCS of a level 3C ruggedized GT-3U-cPCI took place in Q1 2007. The GT3U is available today in convection and conduction cooled formats.

About BittWare, Inc.

Founded in 1989, BittWare, Inc. is the leading designer and manufacturer of hybrid (FPGA and DSP) board-level solutions based on Altera's FPGA s and Analog Devices' TigerSHARC® technology. The company provides the essential building blocks required by OEMs for developing and deploying their innovative systems in defense, communications, instrumentation, and life sciences applications. BittWare's product offering addresses OEM needs from prototype-to-production and span a variety of platforms, including AMC, VME, PCI, CompactPCI, PC/104, PC/104-Plus, PMC and standalone. For more information on BittWare and its innovative DSP and FPGA solutions, visit www.bittware.com

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Stratix II GX is a registered trademark of Altera Corp. TigerSHARC is a registered trademark of Analog Devices. All other products are the trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of their respective holders.