An introduction to offloading CPUs to FPGAs - Hardware programming for software developers

Grzegorz Gancarczyk, Maciej Wielgosz, and Kazimierz Wiatr
EETimes (3/7/2013 12:07 PM EST)

Several factors are disrupting the traditional monopoly of microprocessors for being the chip of choice for C algorithms. These include the cost and accessibility of cross-compilation tools, the power and speed limitations of microprocessors, and the availability of more reliable building blocks.

In this article, three university researchers break down the problem into understandable steps that the average developer can follow to determine if FPGAs are worth the (decreasing) bother and – if the answer is "yes" – how to go about it. This is based on hundreds of hours of class and lab testing. The authors are willing to share teaching materials, curricula, and advice with any certified university. If there is sufficient interest in this article, they will produce two follow-on articles going into more details with regard to lab work and cycle-accurate incremental improvement.

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