Aldec’s New HES FPGA Accelerator Board Targets HPC, HFT and Prototyping Applications

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Aldec, Inc., a pioneer in mixed HDL language simulation and hardware-assisted verification for FPGA and ASIC designs, has launched a new FPGA accelerator board for high performance computing (HPC), high frequency trading (HFT) applications and high speed FPGA prototyping. The HES-XCKU11P-DDR4 is a 1U form factor board featuring a Xilinx Kintex® UltraScale+™ FPGA, a PCIe interface and two QSFP-DD connectors (providing a total of up to 400 Gbit/s bandwidth), and which hits the ideal sweet spot between speed, logic cells, low power draw and price.

The new product, which joins Aldec’s popular range of FPGA accelerators and prototyping boards, also features an FMC HPC connector for interfacing with Aldec’s FMC daughter cards; the industry’s widest range of FPGA mezzanine cards and the newest addition of which is the FMC-NVMe high-bandwidth, low-latency memory extension card. In addition, the HES-XCKU11P-DDR4’s FMC HPC connector is compliant with the ANSI/VITA 57.1 standard, and provides easy extension to similarly compliant peripherals.

“When developing this new FPGA accelerator board, our goal was to achieve an ideal compromise between performance, expandability and price, and thus help users rise to some of today’s most advanced computing and/or networking challenges using FPGA acceleration,” comments Zibi Zalewski, General Manager of Aldec’s Hardware Division.

The ‘DDR4’ in the new product’s name reflects its ability to connect with an external DDR4 memory module via a SO-DIMM memory socket while latest generation QSFP-DD connectors enable network acceleration and wired communication projects. As for the Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale+ device at the heart of Aldec’s new board, it is the XCKU11P-FFVE1517 (-3 speed grade) and has 653K system logic cells, 597K CLB flip-flops, 299K CLB LUTs, 21.1Mb total block RAM, 22.5Mb UltraRAM, and 2,928 DSP slices.

Zalewski concludes: “By combining the benefits of this cost-effective Xilinx FPGA with those of the other resources on our new HES board, we have not only created a compact and powerful product suitable for a variety of complex engineering applications, but also done so at an affordable price. We believe our HES-XCKU11P-DDR4 represents a unique and game-changing value proposition for FPGA compute acceleration along with network and storage applications.”