Need for large local FPGA-accessible memories in the integration of bio-inspired applications into embedded systems

Advanced Principles Group (APG) has developed a reconfigurable computing board (RCB) based on the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA family, potentially capable of 1.5-2.0 TeraOps of compute power, 100 Gbps I/O on front panel, 4 Gbps I/O on backplane, as well as containing more than 4 GBytes of on-board memory. Computationally complex applications such as software-defined radio, synthetic aperture radar, hyper-spectral imaging and cellular neural networks drive similar wide bandwidths and therefore require super-computing I/O and signal processing densities far exceeding the capabilities of current and future microprocessor-based system technology. We illustrate how such applications benefit from the large amount of local FPGA-accessible memory (4+ GBytes) provided on the RCB.