C-Language techniques for FPGA acceleration of embedded software

By David Pellerin (ImpulseC) and Kunal Shenoy (Xilinx)
Mar 31 2006 (14:19 PM), Courtesy of Programmable Logic DesignLine

Developers of embedded and high-performance systems are taking increased advantage of FPGAs for hardware-accelerated computing. FPGA computing platforms effectively bridge the gap between software programmable systems based on traditional microprocessors and systems based on custom hardware functions. Advances in design tools have made it easier to create hardware-accelerated applications directly from C language representations, but it is important to understand how to use these tools to the best advantage, and how decisions made during the design and programming of mixed hardware/software systems will impact overall performance.

This paper presents a brief overview of modern FPGA-based platforms and related software-to-hardware tools, then moves quickly into a set of examples showing how computationally-intensive algorithms can be written, analyzed and optimized for increased performance.

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