Section 1.6. The Importance of a Programming Abstraction

1.6. The Importance of a Programming Abstraction

As the line between what is hardware and what is software continues to blur, the skill sets of the hardware engineer and the software engineer have begun to merge. Hardware engineers have embraced language-based design (HDLs are simply a way to abstract a certain class of hardware as a written description). Software engineersin particular, those developing embedded, multiprocessor applicationshave started to introduce important hardware-oriented concepts such as concurrency and message-driven process synchronization to their design arsenals. Until recently, however, it has been difficult or impossible for software engineers to make the transition from software application programming to actual hardware implementationto turn a conceptual application expressed in a high-level language into an efficient hardware description appropriate for the selected hardware target.

Developments in the area of high-level language compilers for hardware coupled with advances in behavioral synthesis technologies have helped ease this transition, but it remains challenging to create an efficient, mixed hardware/ software application without having substantial expertise in the area of RTL hardware design and in the optimization of applications at a very low level. Early adopters of commercial tools for C-based hardware synthesis have found that they must still drop to a relatively low level of abstraction to create the hardware/software interfaces and deal with the timing-driven nature of hardware design. The availability of high-level language synthesis has not yet eliminated the need for hardware design expertise. A major goal of this book, then, is to show when software-based design methods and tools for FPGAs are appropriate, while acknowledging that not every application is well-suited to such an approach.

Emerging research and technologies are making the FPGA design process easier and placing more control in the hands of software-savvy engineers. Improved software compilers and specialized optimizers for FPGAs and other hardware targets play an important role in this change, but as we've pointed out, higher-level system and algorithm design decisions can have more dramatic impacts than can be achieved through improvements in automated tools. No optimizer, regardless of its power, can improve an application that has been poorly conceived, partitioned, and optimized at an algorithmic level by the original programmer.