C to FPGA technology

For a system designer, its often desired to add Hardware Acceleration to their code. C to FPGA can be a power technology aid to system designers, SW developers & even HW engineers validating their designs. There are commercial compilers available such as from Impulse technologies, that let a system designers quickly create FPGA compatible code for their designs.

 

C to FPGA is still in infancy & is used for custom applications. I haven't come across a known ASIC company deploying large scale ASIC design using C to FPGA as on going methodology. But technology is very promising and has found initial usage with big impact.

 

Applications where a system designer may need Hardware solution?

Here are some examples I pulled together to show where C to FPGA is deployed:

 

Financial Analytics:

* For a custom workload for example in Wall-street a company wants to quickly apply highly sophisticated algorithms to live stream data, algorithm developers often rely on CPU power to crunch the data quickly. Its possible to create FPGA based custom offload engines, where dedicated hardware engine can give edge to traders or trading companies.

There are several other dedicated custom hardware needs for following applications:

 

* Image and video processing; Video decoding; Fractal image generation; DSP filters

* Bioinformatics search algorithms

* Embedded processor acceleration

 

Todo: I'll add several use cases in future where C to FPGA technology can be deployed

 

Tools available to enable C to FPGA: