The kit was a pre-packaged pathway to success. With the kit, you could shave off months to years of ramp-up learning, multiple purchases to get the right compatible tools and materials, and tons of research to learn exactly the right process that would yield acceptable results. The kit had everything you needed except a dollop of creativity. Crack open the package and you could be up and whatever-ing like a near-pro in no time flat.

Today, if Megan wanted to develop a high-throughput embedded video application like HDTV infrastructure, robotic vision, or video compression, her folks would probably start her off with something like Celoxica’s newly-announced RC340 video and imaging development and prototyping kit. OK, at $12,500 it might be out of their price range, but for those of us trying to launch new products in an early, high-growth market, that price would be a pittance. In technology areas like high-throughput video, most development teams are required to solve the same basic but challenging problems, re-inventing the wheel as a cost of entry for each new project.

Celoxica is usually regarded as an electronic design automation (EDA) company. They are the first company to bring the perceived legitimacy of a public corporation into the forward-looking segment of EDA called “ESL” for “Electronic System Level” design. While there has been considerable buzz about ESL in technology publications and conferences recently, skeptics as to the methodology’s long-term viability abound. In a recent interview with a high-tech CEO we were told “ESL is the methodology of the future – and it always will be.” Certainly the ESL label is sufficiently grandiose as to close the door on potential abstraction-raising revolutions of the future. If you’re already designing at the “Electronic System” level, it’s hard to imagine how you’d ever go more abstract than that.

Celoxica has made it part of their mission to bring reality to the ESL label, taking advantage of their technology to offer concrete, high-leverage design solutions to their customers that would move them out of the “tire-kicking” evaluations typical of cutting-edge tool markets and into the “production-ready” world of real revenue. They recognized that they could provide a significant short-cut to their customers if they branched their solution space out beyond software-only tools and provided complete development and prototyping solutions that included hardware development boards coupled to their high-level tool suites.

Customer acceptance of these “Hardware in the Loop” (HIL) design and debugging solutions was high, and their success pushed Celoxica one step farther up the food chain. They realized they could add compelling value by bundling domain-specific versions of their development software and boards with IP and reference designs aimed at specific application areas that were challenging for engineering teams developing leading-edge products. For embedded systems designers, this meant the introduction of a series of Celoxica’s version of “the kit.”

Celoxica’s latest kit, the RC340, is aimed at “designers of advanced digital video and imaging applications.” On the hardware side, the RC340 includes a high-end Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA that is charged with the bulk of the processing, taking advantage of both soft-core embedded processors and large numbers of embedded arithmetic units for accelerating performance-critical algorithms. The board includes 32Mbytes of pipelined SRAM, a DIMM socket for DRAM, and a wide range of video I/O and peripherals, including dual video inputs and outputs. The board can also be upgraded to include a 1024X768 12.1 inch TFT/Touchscreen to provide a development and demonstration vehicle for applications such as in-car infotainment.

Data can be piped onto the board via dual gigabit Ethernet MAC/PHYs with 10/100/1000baseT sockets as well as a USB 2.0 connection. Various additional I/O capabilities include LEDs, LCD display, audio in/out, SPDIF, PS2 keyboard and mouse connectors, RS232 ports, and an SD card socket. The SD card allows flash-based non-volatile storage of FPGA configuration bit files and user application data.

Beyond the hardware, Celoxica couples the RC340 to their C-based “ESL” design software, their PixelStreams video IP library, and reference designs that will get us started on our next video project in true “Kit” style. It’s interesting to consider the potential impact on our development schedule of having a working design pumping video streams through our development hardware on the first day we open the box. Compared with the lead-times and development headaches of typical “from scratch” embedded system development, the Celoxica approach clearly puts us leaps ahead at the beginning.

Celoxica’s philosophy of C-based design for both hardware and software components of the system reduce the need to have black-belt practitioners of both disciplines as part of our team. The combination of ESL-based hardware/software flexibility and flexible, rapid-turnaround prototyping hardware like high-end FPGAs gives us a level of control and “what-if” flexibility that we simply couldn’t afford with conventional design methodologies. If most of the complexity of our system was purely software, we could experiment to our heart’s content, but if some of that complexity was pushed into hardware by performance demands such as, for example, HD video, we were deprived of a big helping of engineering flexibility. Celoxica’s approach returns that degree of control to us and eliminates much of the burden of HDL-based hardware design from the equation.

While much of the talk of the “promise of ESL” has been centered around the technological underpinnings – high-level language synthesis, transaction-level simulation, and virtual prototyping at the earliest, highest levels of system specification, it is good to see companies like Celoxica bringing the nuts-and-bolts practicality of ESL technology to the market. By focusing on specific types of design and providing kit-level jumpstarts to new application developers, companies like Celoxica will have a major impact on the way we approach developing complex applications. Long before pre-packaged ASSP chipsets come on the market, development and prototyping boards, software, and IP like the RC340 and its associated components will get us up and running like experts before we’ve even cracked open a book. I’m sure Megan’s parents would approve.