Chapter1.The FPGA as a Computing Platform

Chapter 1. The FPGA as a Computing Platform

As the cost per gate of FPGAs declines, embedded and high-performance systems designers are being presented with new opportunities for creating accelerated software applications using FPGA-based programmable hardware platforms. From a hardware perspective, these new platforms effectively bridge the gap between software programmable systems based on traditional microprocessors, and application-specific platforms based on custom hardware functions. From a software perspective, advances in design tools and methodology for FPGA-based platforms enable the rapid creation of hardware-accelerated algorithms.

The opportunities presented by these programmable hardware platforms include creation of custom hardware functions by software engineers, later design freeze dates, simplified field updates, and the reduction or elimination of custom chips from many categories of electronic products. Increasingly, systems designers are seeing the benefits of using FPGAs as the basis for applications that are traditionally in the domain of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). As FPGAs have grown in logic capacity, their ability to host high-performance software algorithms and complete applications has grown correspondingly.

In this chapter, we will present a brief overview of FPGAs and FPGA-based platforms and present the general philosophy behind using the C language for FPGA application development. Experienced FPGA users will find much of this information familiar, but nonetheless we hope you stay with us as we take the FPGA into new, perhaps unfamiliar territory: that of high-performance computing.