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XDS Case Study : Optimize from Prototype to Production

The Problem

Our customer had a requirement to design and build a four-channel uplink transcoder for a digital wireless system. Some of the basic building blocks were readily available, but the customer needed additional functional blocks to be developed and integrated into the design. The customer’s original design was sized for a Virtex™ XCV2600E device, but the customer thought the price of the device would prohibit their innovative product from being marketable.

The Engagement

Xilinx Design Services (XDS) visited the customer to gain a better understanding of the design and to let them get to know us and our expertise. The customer showed us the block diagram of the required functionality in order to get our views and feedback. One channel of the design is shown below:

The customer wanted a much smaller design output to reduce product cost. We suggested a design concept that provided a detailed analysis of possible solutions to meet the customer’s cost and feature requirements. The concept study lasted four weeks, and the deliverables reported what reduction in device size might be possible. This report allowed the customer to re-evaluate the viability of their product.

The Solution

The study outlined and presented all the possible design improvements that could be made to provide the customer with the best possible solution. The study revealed that if various parts of the circuit were optimized, we could reduce the overall design size by more than 80%. This reduction took into account the relatively slow speed of the four paths through the FPGA, which allowed the four paths to be multiplexed. XDS gave the customer a solution in a Virtex XCV400E device.

After reviewing the report, the customer engaged XDS to perform the implementation phase of the program, which was done in two parts to give the customer the opportunity to incrementally develop and test parts of their system. In other words, they did not have to set all of the requirements in stone before XDS began the task.

	The use of a Xilinx FPGA enabled the customer to prototype their product within four months.
	The customer was able to recover the one-time development cost from XDS before even completing prototyping.
	The XDS solution delivered more than 90% savings on the Xilinx device price.
	Engaging Xilinx Design Services enabled the customer to develop a successful product with a viable cost structure and a faster time to market.
Find Out For Yourself To find out more, email us at: designservices@xilinx.com