Promwad Accelerates Product Development with Vendor-Agnostic FPGA Design in Multiple Industries 

FPGA design has always been a proven way to develop industry-specific and high-performance hardware in a relatively short time and without the significant costs of custom ASIC design. However, in times of electronic component shortages, the market demands another advantage: an independent choice of available FPGA platforms from various vendors. And the Promwad engineering team was able to provide all these requirements in their designs, including the development of AI on Edge systems.

Alexander Krainov, CTO at Promwad Embedded Dept., explains: “As a result of 18 years in the market and the implementation of FPGA projects for almost all modern emerging industries, we have gained experience with virtually every popular vendor, so we are now able to provide our customers with complete freedom of choice and select optimal FPGA platforms in terms of availability, price, functionality and speed of implementation.”

Promwad is an official partner of Xilinx, Intel, Microchip, and Lattice Semiconductor. The company FPGA engineers also work with components from NVidia, Analog Devices, Renesas, and Texas Instruments. The ability to freely switch between different vendors was much in demand during critical shortages of electronic components or so-called chipageddon when device manufacturers had to port their code from one chip to another to avoid delays in deliveries, which could be several months.  

One example of such projects is the migration from Intel Cyclone 10 GX to Lattice in a pro-A/V and broadcast equipment ordered by a European customer. The Promwad engineers have shared this and other case studies on FPGA design the HardwareBee readers:

Broadcasting & Video Streaming

3G/12G SDI gearbox 

This is a compact solution to exchange high-definition signals in real-time. From an engineering point of view, it is a bi-directional single-link to quad-link converter. It helps avoid signal transformation loss. The device supports both SQD and 2SI modes. Here is a solution block diagram to give its overall idea:

Automotive

Radar data processing

The engineering task was to develop the adapter board which connects to Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ EVB and the customer’s radar board via FMC. The FPGA engineers at Promwad developed FPGA firmware, Cortex-R5 bare-metal applications, well as drivers and HAL:

The technologies used: Zynq Ultrascale+, Cortex-R5, ARM, LVDS interface, 10G interface for processed data downstream, DDR4 PL for data storage.

Industrial automation

IEEE C37.94 interface converter

Commissioned by a manufacturer of protecting power systems, Promwad developed a PCB and FPGA design for the IEEE C37.94 interface converter based on Xilinx Spartan FPGA. The device serves as a part of the Smart Grid IEC-61850 teleprotection system.

Telecom

Zynq US+ 10G Ethernet

This is hardware implementation of UDP protocol and 10G MAC by the company’s engineers:

The technologies used: ZynqUS+, hardware 10G UDP offloader, UDP, AXI4-Stream data interfaces.  

Scientific Instrumentation

X-Ray imaging system 

Promwad designed a prototype of the new device for raw image capturing from 80 X-Ray CMOS sensors. The images were captured and pre-processed by Lattice MACHXO3 FPGA, and downstreamed to the host system based on Xilinx ARTIX-7. Firmware updates and other control operations were implemented on external MCU.

The technologies used: Xilinx, CMOS, 1G, Lattice

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Promwad has compiled its FPGA skill matrix that clearly shows the level of knowledge and experience in working with specific platforms and technologies. This matrix greatly simplifies planning and launching projects with new clients, who usually start with a pilot design or a particular engineering task that can be used to check the company’s expertise, communications and ability to provide an agreed result within the specified time frame.

For contact information or company details, please, visit the Promwad profile at https://hardwarebee.com/vendors/promwad/