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3L Diamond TI C6000 Multicore

A 3L Diamond TI C6000 Multicore Licence supports the Multicore Digital Signal Processors from Texas Instruments.

Diamond's proven multiprocessor model now extends to multicore DSPs, bridging the conceptual gap between multi- and single-core development. With Diamond, Multicore DSPs are available as collections of several independent processors and implied connections between them.

Diamond enables development to scale smoothly as cores per DSP and multicore DSPs per system increase:

expanding a system from six cores on one multicore DSP to more on a cluster of independent DSPs is trivially easy
actual code is unaffected as Diamond removes the need to include explicit information about shared resources.

Differences between communication resources are completely invisible:

Diamond's channel I/O API functions are always the same irrespective of the actual connection mechanism used
Diamond channels always behave in the same way, whether between two tasks on the same core, on different cores in the same DSP, on different cores in different DSPs, or even across combinations of DSPs and FPGAs
channel by channel, Diamond automatically chooses the best I/O implementation and optimises the communication settings
channels can use high-speed SRIO and EMAC links available to provide maximum throughput between tasks...

Diamond also manages time-consuming chores such as:

loading complex multicore systems
memory allocation across a range of shared and private memories
handling the complexities of caches and their non-obvious interactions with multiple cores.

The ability to work seamlessly across multiple cores, multiple DSPs, and multiple FPGAs makes Diamond ideal for multicore use.

Download the 3L Diamond 4.0 presentation here

3L Diamond TI C6000

A 3L Diamond C6000 Licence supports tasks that will run on the single-core C6000-series Digital Signal Processors from Texas Instruments. Diamond has been successful in providing the highest levels of performance and efficient abstraction from hardware, allowing customers to concentrate on their core capabilities rather than wasting valuable time on mundane tasks, including:

organising the loading of multiple processors
managing inter-processor communication
avoiding deadlock in communications
managing irritating processor issues such as cache coherence
optimising EDMA and drivers for peripherals
managing host communications
synchronising different DSPs

3L Diamond Xilinx

A Diamond Xilinx licence adds to the functionality of Diamond by building complete firmware from user-defined tasks. To these it automatically adds any pre-defined blocks needed to give communication resources and deal with issues such as managing different clock domains. The firmware is embedded in the final application image and is loaded automatically to the correct FPGAs when the program is executed. Diamond supports both independent FPGA modules and FPGAs attached to DSP modules.

You can create FPGA tasks for Diamond with a wide range of tools, including Matlab Simulink, Impulse-C, and Xilinx System Generator. Simply placing a task on a processor declared to be an FPGA will instruct the configurer to take the task's VHDL or netlist description and incorporate it as a bitstream into the final application image file. When the application is loaded, Diamond takes care of configuring each FPGA onto which you have placed tasks.

Communication between pairs of tasks is still managed by channels. You can connect a DSP task to an FPGA task, a DSP task to another DSP task, or an FPGA task to another FPGA task. All the firmware blocks needed to implement this communication are added to the bitstream automatically. Because Diamond and the Diamond IDE provide the know-how for creating firmware, even if you are not an expert in FPGA technology you can create highly parallel applications very quickly; adding the logic needed for efficient communication with the outside world and between tasks is handled automatically. If you are an expert, Diamond can expose the low-level details to let you fine-tune your solution.

Individual licences allow you to build applications made of processors of a particular type. Licences combine to support systems with mixed processor types.

The tools can be accessed directly from the command line or a makefile, or through the Diamond Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

We recommend using the IDE as it will perform many housekeeping functions for you automatically.