Applications
Test & Measurement
Test and measurement solutions rely on cutting-edge technologies to achieve optimal performance and precision covering a broad range of industries. FPGAs provide incredible capability and exceptional flexibility for engineering today’s test and measurement requirements. Test and measurement are performed in education and training institutes, industrial environments, and high-tech research. Considerations for test and measurement include budget constraints, overall design, performance, flexibility to change and time-to-market.
Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules and FrontPanel SDK give engineers the tools they need to deliver ultra-high performance equipment that their customers can rely on and allow them to focus on the equipment, not the interface.
Our extensive selection of FPGA modules are suitable for applications from simple instrumentation and control hardware to the most sophisticated DSP-enabled, multichannel hardware. Platform support for Windows, macOS, and Linux on both x86 and ARM architectures means that a wide variety of embedded and hosted environments can be supported by a single API.
Customer Deployments
Fibics
Fibics Incorporated provides analysis solutions to semiconductor and materials science / metallurgy clients, specializing in focused ion beam (FIB) applications and analytical services.
According to Mike Phaneuf, Fibics’ President, “Opal Kelly FPGA modules have been used as the heart of half-a-dozen designs for solving those problems.”
Optiphase
Optiphase manufactures interferometric fiber optic sensor solutions. John Dailing at Optiphase developed a PC-controlled Waveform and Timing Generator (WTG) Instrument using Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules mated with a custom adapter PCB. The WTG Instrument supports R&D instrument development where fully custom and embedded solutions are not practical.
Swabian Instruments
Building a cutting-edge piece of test and measurement equipment is not easy. By leveraging an off-the-shelf FPGA module from Opal Kelly and building their application on top of the FrontPanel SDK, Swabian Instruments has been able to focus on delivering a vital tool to the research community without sacrificing their high-value resources on building the foundations.
Yale University
Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules were used in the Yale University e-Lab in the hardware test-bed for the first fully-integrated implementation of a patch-clamp measurement system. “When I found the Opal Kelly module, it was clear there was no point in building a solution internally.” – Eugenio Culurciello, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering.
NIST
The Time and Frequency Division of the Ion Storage Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created an open-source general purpose digital feedback controller using Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules.
According to the project description, “it has been optimized for feedback control of lasers in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics experiments, but it should be applicable in other control applications with similar bandwidth, noise, and loop shape requirements. Their paper, “An Open Source Digital Servo for AMO Physics Experiments”, describes the details and their GitHub project includes sources for the hardware, firmware, software design, and enclosure.
Stanford University
Digital cameras keep packing in the pixels, but they can’t hide the truth: Photos are flat. Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules helped engineers at Stanford University develop a way to bring 3D clarity and depth to the world of 2D photography. Popular Science Online Article
Texas Instruments
The TX-SDK-V2 is Texas Instruments‘ evaluation board for the LM96530, LM96550, and LM96570 components as a complete ultrasound transmit solution. The TX-SDK-V2 utilizes the Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules and FrontPanel SDK to provide a GUI to control the LM96570 digital beamformer and LM96530 T/R switch.
The ADS1675REF is a reference design for the ADS1675 high-speed, high-precision analog-to-digital converter. The ADS1675REF utilizes the Opal Kelly’s FPGA modules and FrontPanel SDK to provide data transfer of the ADC samples to the PC for analysis in Texas Instruments’ own ADCPro analysis software.
VisiSonics
VisiSonics RealSpace™ tools combine real-time acoustic signal processing algorithms with computer vision and machine learning on GPU equipped platforms to provide a new generation of technologies to address real world problems.
VisiSonics uses Opal Kelly modules for their RealSpace Audio Camera – which combine 64 microphones and five video cameras to capture and process real-time frame registered 3D audio / video scenes.
“We use the Opal Kelly XEM modules to control and format the data acquisition process and manage the device.” said Bill Strum VP of Business Development and COO. “The Opal Kelly module is easy to develop with and its use has allowed us to focus our energy on our core business of signal processing and industrial acoustic solutions rather than on complex digital design. We have begun our next product cycle and Opal Kelly is still our design choice.”
