Lyrtech RD - Diamond Lyrtech edition - Diamond Lyrtech edition

Diamond Lyrtech edition

Diamond by 3L is for application developers who use DSPs, FPGAs and GPPs to create multiprocessor systems. Expressly made for multiprocessor systems, Diamond is a tools suite that offers a highly automated development flow from concept to applications running on multiprocessor hardware.

The Lyrtech edition of Diamond allows you to take full advantage of Lyrtech's hardware integration with little or no effort — leaving more time to focus on adding value to your DSP applications. Application code is organized as a number of independent communicating tasks and, through Diamond, operations such as loading multiple DSPs or FPGAs, as well as organizing communications between tasks are handled automatically.

Who is 3L?

3L — the Multiprocessor Design Company — specializes in multiprocessing, where many processing elements work closely together on the same problem to produce results faster than would a single processing element alone. 3L offers tools that substantially reduce the time and effort necessary to develop multiprocessor applications. 3L targets special-purpose hardware optimized for multiprocessor digital signal processing applications in such fields as telecommunications, radar, sonar, imaging and many others.

Why develop with Diamond?

Diamond from 3L enhances single-processor tools with a proven and simple multiprocessor model offering a level of abstraction that leads to efficient, coherent, reliable and flexible systems. The Diamond multiprocessor design software uses a sequential process communication model that offers a simple, yet powerful way of developing applications that use one or more processors.

Diamond works with tasks (or self-contained blocks of code) that communicate with each other. A Diamond application is built from a number of such tasks that communicate through channels. Diamond automatically converts channels into efficient physical data transfer mechanisms on the target hardware.

A Diamond application specifies:

Hardware processors and physical connections between them
Software tasks and the channels that connect them
How the software is mapped onto the hardware

Tasks can be built for a processor-based technology (such as the DSP using the TI compiler) or a logic-based technology (such the FPGA using Xilinx tools), and gives you simple, efficient abstractions of the actual hardware. This abstraction hides many unimportant, low-level details, letting you enjoy independence from the hardware—the logical structure of an application is independent from the actual processors where the tasks are placed. Because the system is described through this simple and consistent model, the actual hardware implementation of the tasks is not described until late in the design process, leading to clearly structured systems that are flexible, reliable and maintainable.

Diamond is also a great gateway to third-party tools. For example, those of you not comfortable with developing for the FPGA can consider using such tools as Impulse C, allowing you to write code in a C-like language that Diamond compiles into tasks that can be placed in an FPGA.

Much of the housekeeping associated with developing multiprocessor applications (choosing the correct building tools, writing systems descriptions, etc.) is handled for you by the Diamond IDE, an integrated development environment based on Eclipse, where you can create and run Diamond applications.
The Diamond IDE also acts as a server that loads application files to the target hardware; a process that automatically places tasks in the correct processors and makes sure that they start in the correct sequence. The server also allows communicating with the host computer where it runs through standard I/Os. Visit the 3L Web site for more details about 3L products.