Executive Summary

Nallatech Ltd.

Leading supplier in High Performance FPGA Computing
Privately owned, based in Glasgow, Scotland, with
six offices in UK and USA

The Challenge

Staying on the leading edge of the most fiercely contested markets leaves no time to waste on clumsy development tools or confusion about computing details.

Nallatech Ltd.'s demanding customers in the defense and security markets expect plenty from the boards, modules, cards, and software the company sells. These designers and integrators work with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) precisely because they require specialized, high-performing computations they can bring to market quickly and economically. There's no room in that formula for software that gets in the way of system design and implementation.

How can Nallatech stay ahead of its customers, though, as the complexity of designs increases each year, at the same time as the customers increasingly expect solutions equally at home under Linux and Windows? When sales increase faster than the pool of capable cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) developers, is it inevitable that software applications stagnate and accumulate defects?

Specialized needs; market leadership

Nallatech has over four thousand customer installations around the world. A typical customer builds specialized products having to do with RADAR and other avionics, "signal intelligence" (SIGINT) pertinent to military and security monitoring, high-performance computing for bioinformatics or financial services, or related domains. Nallatech's products and services help design and integrate FPGAs which perform critical calculations thousands or millions of times faster or more economically than equivalent general-purpose computers.

These special-purpose chips are only a part of the total solutions in seismic processing or RADAR-equipped command centers these customers deliver, though. At the same time as they demand high performance and rigor, customers also require products that are easy to use, so they can concentrate on their projects as a whole. They need the flexibility of a range of standard forms and technologies, including PCI, VME, PCI-104, and more. The software Nallatech provides to support FPGA design and production has to work correctly and easily from the first time it's installed, whatever the combination of host and target electronics.

Nallatech has done this well enough to be the market leader in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGA computing products. "We're the best [for example] at delivering FPGA to military" customers, explains Andy Gaskell, design engineer with Nallatech. "We pride ourselves on making it easy for customers."

Part of that ease of use comes from convenient GUI applications. Nallatech is a technology-oriented company, and has written much of its software down to a low level, including GUI applications coded in C against the GTK toolkit. It's hard to grow the Nallatech portfolio on that basis, though; to write custom software with that approach takes disproportionate effort or expertise for a vendor that needs to stay on top of higher-level integration.

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The Solution

Scripting solutions for vendors and customers

ActiveTcl transforms that analysis for Nallatech and its customers. Rather than put so much into low-level coding itself, says Gaskell, Nallatech increasingly relies on ActiveState's certified implementation of the Tcl/Tk open-source language to build its programs.

ActiveTcl plays several different roles in Nallatech's applications. The company has been using the Tk GUI toolkit for over four years to build well-behaved, fully portable GUI programs. Gaskell is enthusiastic about the "excellent cross-platform" software, and prizes the ability to get market-ready results quicker than if his development team coded to operating-system primitives. FPGA work, along with other forms of electronic design automation (EDA), has a long history; in fact, Tcl itself was first invented almost twenty years ago to solve specific problems in EDA. Customers increasingly expect GUI applications for their day-to-day work. ActiveTcl's high productivity makes it possible to turn out fully-featured GUI versions of what might have been command-line programs for an earlier generation.

There's even more to ActiveTcl's involvement, though. Along with its service as the language of implementation of off-the-shelf applications, it's also a well-regarded "extension language". In EDA and allied fields, it's common to allow end-users to configure and customize applications with Tcl. "Tcl in our industry is the most widely-used" scripting language, observes Gaskell; "it's a great scripting language." Customers solve problems that vendors don't even know exist--and in many high-security situations, vendors never will be allowed to learn of them. Typical end-users scripts constrain FPGA designs to fit corporate standards, or embody proprietary construction principles, or prepare financial reports that lead to quick decisions. The combination of a well-crafted base application, and a general-purpose extension language like ActiveTcl, makes for results that would be simply impossible if customers had to wait on vendors to implement them.

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The Result

ActiveState's ActiveTcl releases fully support the open-source Tcl language that has decades of familiarity in EDA. At the same time, ActiveTcl provides a certified, supported implementation that allows companies like Nallatech to leave the headaches of library generation and maintenance to the experts at ActiveState. Gaskell knows that, "We could have created our own" language or release, but "it's a much more straightforward approach, and less problematic" to leverage ActiveTcl. Nallatech has, through the years, "encountered bugs and problems--but they've always been fixed. ActiveState provides excellent support for us."

Nallatech's experience has been so good, in fact, that Gaskell thinks of ActiveState as an extension of his own staff: "It's difficult to differentiate. [They answer] really quickly--[usually] the next day. ActiveTcl gives us more time to spend on the things we like to do." For Gaskell and his team of a dozen Tcl-involved coders, ActiveTcl is an easy choice to make.

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