Impulse - FPGA CoDesign

You know you can get the performance you need by introducing programmable hardware into the system, but how do you do it without calling in a hardware design expert and rewriting the entire application? How can you avoid the months-long hardware design nightmare that such a rewrite can become? And how can you allow your software team to experiment with new algorithmic approaches, free from the constraints that prematurely locking down a hardware interface can create?

The Solution: CoDeveloper and Impulse C

Introducing CoDeveloper, from Impulse Accelerated Technologies. CoDeveloper brings the power of C programming to programmable hardware targets based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). CoDeveloper will change the way you think about programmable hardware, and will change the way you design high-performance applications.

CoDeveloper is a C language development system for coarse grained programmable hardware targets including mixed processor and FPGA platforms. CoDeveloper's core technology is the Impulse C library and related tools that allow standard ANSI C to be used for the expression of highly parallel applications and algorithms targeting mixed hardware/software targets. This set of C libraries and tools (which include the CoBuilder RTL generator, CoMonitor Application Monitor and the CoDeveloper Application Manager) can be used in conjunction with standard programming environments including Microsoft Visual Studio, Metrowerks CodeWarrior, GCC, GDB and other standard tools for the development, debugging and implementation of highly parallel applications directly onto programmable hardware platforms.

Accelerate applications while accelerating the design process!

Using C for hardware design can reduce the time to develop prototypes, to make changes and to create optimized end-products. Because Impulse C libraries support hardware and software development, FPGA-based applications can be quickly described and implemented in hardware with the needed hardware/software interfaces generated automatically.

The traditional design process

With traditional tools hardware development becomes the bottleneck. Any change to the application at a system-level requires major hardware re-engineering and corresponding schedule delays.

Designing with Impulse C

CoDeveloper and Impulse C let you quickly generate and iterate software/hardware prototypes, allowing more time for experimentation and freeing up hardware development resources for critical system components and design optimization.

CoDeveloper: the freedom to experiment

CoDeveloper gives you the power to experiment. Experiment with alternate algorithmic approaches, with alternate hardware/software partitioning and with alternate target platforms. Using the same C language source code, you now have the ability to evaluate your applications and their constituent processes using different hardware and software targets. For example, you can quickly set up a test in which the same source code (with minor modifications) can be executed in a dedicated processor or embedded processor, and on the FPGA as hardware. Doing so will provide you with real, quantifiable performance numbers and allow you to more easily make hardware/software partitioning decisions.

Impulse C makes it easy to create mixed hardware/software applications on FPGA platforms. This is particularly useful for performance analysis and for direct software/hardware performance measurements.

next... ANSI C to RTL conversion

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