CAST COREspondence – Space IP, TSN Webinar, SGDMA, SuccessesThe IP cores newsletter from CAST, Inc.
CAST COREspondence The IP Newsletter from CAST, Inc. — Feb. 26, 2021
NASA’s success with the Perseverance Rover mission to Mars is an inspiration to engineers worldwide. We’re proud to have provided IP cores to this and other past and upcoming space and lunar applications.
Back on earth, we continue to release new IP and satisfy advanced customer requirements. We’re also sharing some of what we’ve learned with a live webinar on achieving ultra-low latency in automotive Time Sensitive Networking systems. Read more about all this below.
We hope that CAST IP might be an inspiration for making your systems smaller, faster, more efficient, and overall better competitors in your marketplace. Drop me an email or give me a call any time to discuss how we can help.
At CAST, we’re proud to have licensed IP to multiple space systems contractors and government agencies through the years, for several Mars and now upcoming lunar missions. Curiosity Rover has been sending back Mars images processed through IP from CAST since 2011 and is still going strong. Much of Perseverance Rover’s new imagery that is just starting to arrive—and some of its onboard instruments—also benefit from IP we licensed.
Our space system customers choose IP from CAST for two main reasons:
It’s often technically superior, especially in its small size and ultra-low power consumption, and
Our unmatched support for both ASICs and FPGAs enables flexible implementation in space-ready, radiation-hardened chips such as those from Microsemi and Xilinx.
Our customers’ end applications and the specific IP cores they licensed are confidential, but recent space licenses have included JPEG-LS and H.264 codecs for imaging and CAN bus interface cores for intra-system communication.
If you’d like IP cores that are as efficient, powerful, and reliable as those used in space—even if your applications never leave the ground—then give us a call or email to discuss your requirements.
(Photos credit: NASA)
New IP: AXI Scatter-Gather DMA Core
Data processing accelerators—with engines for compression, cryptography, or packet processing—typically use a streamed data flow through the system. You may, however, want such an accelerator to store or retrieve its data to or from memory rather than directly transferring it through the pipeline stages. Our new AXI Scatter-Gather DMA Core makes it significantly easier to build such an architecture.
The AXI4-SGDMA implements a DMA engine that connects a core’s AXI4-Stream data interfaces to system memory through an AMBA® AXI4 bus matrix. It works in two ways: a Host-to-Peripherals (H2P) interface or a Peripheral-to-Host (P2H) interface.
The AXI4-SGDMA can reduce the CPU’s usual responsibility for orchestrating data transfers by operating in Scatter-Gather (SG) mode (leaner Direct Mode is also available). The core is remarkably configurable and easy to integrate into a variety of systems. It’s an obvious choice for companion use with our GZIP data compression engines, our image and video codecs, or our Internet Protocol stacks and encryption cores.
Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is increasingly popular as the onboard backbone for today’s sophisticated automotive systems. This set of standards enables synchronized, deterministic communication over conventional Ethernet, prioritizing, for example, emergency braking action over low windshield washer fluid.
TSN networks can achieve low latency, but how to design them to reduce the latency of every device and achieve ultra-low system latency is not apparent. This live webinar will help make it easier for you to do just that.
Primary presenter Marcus Pietzsch from our development partner Fraunhofer IPMS will expand on his recent Automotive Ethernet Congress presentation. He will define the potential sources of latency in an automotive network and explore their individual and cumulative effects through hardware examples. An interactive Q and A session with Marcus and CAST’s Dr. Nikos Zervas will follow.
The TSN webinar runs live twice: register in advance to improve your TSN network fluency.
Bigstream Solutions, Inc. makes it easy for users to run existing big data analysis applications like Apache Spark™ ten times faster than with a traditional CPU alone. Bigstream challenged CAST to deliver an advanced IP core that could enhance their hardware accelerators while reducing their team’s product development cycle and fitting within stringent pricing and business constraints.
As with most customers, we worked closely with Bigstream’s engineers on a pre-sale level, jointly identifying the best technical and business package for Bigstream’s needs. After thorough analysis, Bigstream selected CAST for its IP features, strong field expertise, solid reputation, dedicated support, and flexible licensing.
Read more in our press release, and contact Sales to get your own benefits of the CAST IP experience.
Velodyne Lidar Licenses TSN IP Core from CAST
In 2019, Velodyne Lidar, Inc., a global leader in lidar solutions for automotive and autonomous applications, selected IP from CAST to add Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) capabilities to its sensor products.
Kevin Camera, Velodyne’s Senior Director of Firmware Engineering, explains:
“Automatic synchronization of multiple sensors via Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) protocols and technologies is critical to building advanced autonomous mobility solutions. A TSN-enabled in-vehicle network can provide very high precision synchronization of independent lidar point clouds without additional dedicated hardware. “Solutions provided by CAST offered accelerated time to market and an established reference for increased interoperability with third party networks and systems.”
At CAST, we’re proud to have licensed IP to multiple space systems contractors and government agencies through the years, for several Mars and now upcoming lunar missions. Curiosity Rover has been sending back Mars images processed through IP from CAST since 2011 and is still going strong. Much of Perseverance Rover’s new imagery that is just starting to arrive—and some of its onboard instruments—also benefit from IP we licensed.
Our customers’ end applications and the specific IP cores they licensed are confidential, but recent space licenses have included JPEG-LS and H.264 codecs for imaging and CAN bus interface cores for intra-system communication. 
TSN networks can achieve low latency, but how to design them to reduce the latency of every device and achieve ultra-low system latency is not apparent. This live webinar will help make it easier for you to do just that.
As with most customers, we worked closely with Bigstream’s engineers on a pre-sale level, jointly identifying the best technical and business package for Bigstream’s needs. After thorough analysis, Bigstream selected CAST for its IP features, strong field expertise, solid reputation, dedicated support, and flexible licensing.
In 2019, 
