Developing processor-compatible C-code for FPGA hardware acceleration

David Pellerin and Brian Durwood, Impulse Accelerated Technologies
8/21/2011 3:07 PM EDT

FPGAs are becoming increasingly popular with software teams to accelerate critical portions of their code. In most cases these teams already have processing stacks and applications written in C that target embedded microprocessors or servers. For applications that require acceleration, a logical next step is to offload some portion of the code to an FPGA. A good way to do this is to migrate portions of the working microprocessor system to an FPGA while keeping the code base compatible with the original processor. This approach lowers risk and allows the software team to more easily experiment with alternate implementations, iterating toward an accelerated solution without creating a fundamentally different branch of the code.

This article describes how to identify which code sections can best benefit from hardware acceleration, use coding styles to retain commonality, and select hardware for both development and deployment.

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