- MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST REGISTRATION
- MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST VERIFICATION
- MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST SOFTWARE
- MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST CODE
MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST REGISTRATION
For far more information, see BDTI Senior Engineer Shehrzad Qureshi's OpenCL presentation from the July 2012 Embedded Vision Alliance Member Summit ( registration on the Embedded Vision Alliance website is required prior to accessing the video).Īltera's to-date involvement in OpenCL is multi-year and incremental in nature.
MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST CODE
In short, OpenCL provides a means of developing, in a hardware-independent manner, code that can be easily partitioned among the various available processing platforms within a heterogeneous system.CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and (of course) FPGAs. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. OpenCL is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. What is OpenCL? Here's what the website of the Khronos Group, an industry alliance which maintains the standard (along with others, such as the well-known OpenGL), says: albeit with a somewhat different solution: an OpenCL-based approach. And unsurprisingly, therefore, Xilinx's primary competitor Altera is also responding to the market need. But the overall trend towards increasingly higher levels of design abstraction is a vendor-independent phenomenon. HLS, which Xilinx had obtained via the January 2011 acquisition of AutoESL and its AutoPilot product line, targets the direct implementation of C, C++, and SystemC behavioral descriptions into Xilinx FPGAs. In the face of intensifying time-to-market pressures in many industries, the speed and efficiency of FPGA design tools has become an increasingly critical consideration, including how those tools handle late-stage ECOs (engineering change orders).Īt the time, I was writing about Xilinx's Vivado design tools suites, specifically about the HLS (high-level synthesis) tool included within the sub-$5,000 System Edition suite option. Enabling flexible (and rapid) movement of the hardware-versus-software partition in order to assess design alternatives becomes increasingly attractive once the FPGA fabric and the microprocessor share the same sliver of silicon.Īnd even for designers committed to existing HDLs, the associated tools must evolve to keep pace with growing device capacity and complexity, and with design methodologies that are evolving to address that growing capacity and complexity, such as the increasing reliance on design reuse and IP cores (in diverse formats from HDL source to pre-placed-and-routed blocks).
MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST SOFTWARE
C-language-based flows are particularly attractive in that they offer the potential for relatively straightforward hardware acceleration of functions that would alternatively run in software on a system processor.
MEMPHIS BLEEK THE UNDERSTANDING SHAREBEAST VERIFICATION
And more recently, high-level synthesis has entered the mainstream, after years of research and development and early-adopter experimentation.Įffective high-level-language-based FPGA design flows have become desirable (by implementers) and sought after (by suppliers), since at least in theory they can enable big gains in design and verification productivity. These later gave way to HDLs (hardware description languages) such as VHDL and Verilog. Initial FPGA design flows were schematic-based. In particular, design techniques employing increasingly higher levels of abstraction have been required to address the increasing chip capabilities. Within a technical article published in the August 2012 edition of InsideDSP, I wrote:Īs FPGAs have evolved, the means by which engineers create FPGA designs have also evolved.