Does System Design Still Need Abstraction?


About 15 years ago, the assumption in the EDA industry was that system design would be inevitable. The transition from gate-level design to a new entry point at the register transfer level (RTL) seemed complete with logic synthesis becoming well-adopted. The next step seemed to be so obvious at the time: High-level synthesis (HLS) and transaction-based development beyond RTL—also taking into ... » read more

Using HLS To Improve Algorithms


Can an HLS optimization tool outperform expert-level hand-optimizations? A recently published white paper examines how SLX FPGA is used to optimize a secure hash algorithm. T the results are compared to a competition-winning hand-optimized HLS implementation of the same algorithm. This approach provides a nearly 400x speed-up over the unoptimized implementation and even outperforms the hand ... » read more

Using SLX FPGA For Performance Optimization Of SHA-3 For HLS


Author: Zubair Wadood SLX FPGA facilitates converting your C/C++ project into an FPGA bitstream easier and with higher performance. Leveraging standard HLS (High Level Synthesis) tools from FPGA vendors, SLX FPGA tackles the challenges associated with the HLS design flow. In this paper, the results of an SLX FPGA-optimized implementation of a Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-3; also known as Kecca... » read more

High-Level Design And High-Level Verification


Not so long ago, some EDA vendors were painting a very attractive picture of chip design in the then-near future. The idea was that an architectural team would write a single description of the complete system in some high-level language, usually C/C++/SystemC, and that a new class of EDA tool would automatically partition the design into hardware and software, choosing the functionality of eac... » read more

Machine Learning For Autonomous Drive


Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) is arguably the biggest technical innovation of the last decade. Although the algorithms for AI have been in existence for many years, the recent explosion of both data as well as faster compute made it possible to apply those algorithms to solve many real life use cases. One of the most prominent of these use cases is fully aut... » read more

Synthesizing Hardware From Software


The ability to automatically generate optimized hardware from software was one of the primary tenets of system-level design automation that was never fully achieved. The question now is whether that will ever happen, and whether it is just a matter of having the right technology or motivation to make it possible. While high-level synthesis (HLS) did come out of this work and has proven to be... » read more

Facilitating High Level Synthesis from MATLAB generated C C++


MATLAB is the go-to toolbox for high level algorithm design in many application domains, ranging from signal processing to control systems and data analysis. MATLAB Coder generates executable C/C++ code from MATLAB implementations. However, the performance requirements of these applications often mandate a hardware implementation. SLX FPGA helps transform the auto-generated C/C++ code into a sy... » read more

High-Level Synthesis For Autonomous Drive


The sensors in autonomous vehicles continuously generate a high volume of data in real time about the environment surrounding the car. The vehicles need new hardware architectures to be able to process this data quickly and make decisions that enable self driving. Catapult, the industry’s leading High-Level Synthesis (HLS) platform, provides a new paradigm of designing silicon at a higher lev... » read more

Optimize MATLAB C/C++ Code For HLS


A common use case for high-level synthesis (HLS) is taking 3rd party generated or legacy C/C++ algorithms and converting the algorithm to a hardware implementation using an HLS compiler. This can present many challenges to the developer since there is little insight or understanding of the underlying code. In a recently published white paper, we examine how SLX FPGA is used to take a MATLAB... » read more

Konica Minolta Proves C++ Level Signoff Possibilities Using Catapult HLS Platform


A team’s ultimate goal is to move verification up to the C++ level in order to minimize the time spent in RTL verification and to achieve C++ signoff. A team at Konica Minolta® has been using the Catapult HLS Platform for many years to dramatically improve their productivity by coding at the C++ level and using the platform to generate RTL. They recently evaluated the high-level verification... » read more

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