| Introduction | Services | Sample Product | Qualifications | Contact |
Softer Hardware develops and sells custom reconfigurable hardware solutions. Our goal is to provide you with drivers, reconfigurable hardware platforms and soft IP-cores for your niche computer interfacing needs. The primary platform for our products is the generic FPGA-based Universal PCI card pictured here.
Our card uses Cypress Semiconductor's DP-PCI as a fast and flexible interface between your personal computer and the reconfigurable hardware. The DP-PCI is PCI 2.2 compliant, supports both master and target modes, and contains 128 Kbits of dual-port memory. Because the DP-PCI is a full-fledged ASIC, you need not worry about PCI functionality or performance.
Our card's reconfigurable core is a Xilinx SpartanXL. This core easily accomodates designs requiring up to 30,000 system gates and operating at frequencies up to 66 MHz and is truly field reconfigurable. When a design update is needed, a new configuration file is simply sent to the in-service machine and a driver call uploads it directly to the SpartanXL. No configuration EEPROM is necessary. In fact, reconfiguration takes less than 5 ms and may be performed countless times - with no required reboot or driver reload!
Our card's default interface consists of 40 TTL IO signals divided into 5 buffered 8-bit ports. Each port, plus fuse-protected 5 Volts and ground, is accessible via a 10-pin RJ48 jack. For further interfacing flexibility, a small daughter board may bypass the default front-end. We can integrate your custom front-end electronics as well as your preferred connector with this daughter board.
The SEC-PCI is a product built on our reconfigurable platform. The SEC-PCI performs high-speed quadrature filtering, decoding and 24-bit counting on four channels. Real-time compare, capture, preset, underflow and overflow functions are implemented as well. This product is used primarily in photogrammetric data collection systems. Fischer Computer Systems contracted us to improve and migrate their SEC-ISA card from the ISA bus to the PCI bus.
| Introduction | Services | Sample Product | Qualifications | Contact |