High level languages have never worked out well. (By the way, there is technically no separate "Verilog" specification any longer. I think the best path forward is just to stick to Systemverilog and to get the synthesis tools to support more Systemverilog features.
#Cpu speed for fpga simulation software
What is nice about HLS, however, is the ability to develop your algorithms in floating point and let the HLS tool address the floating- to fixed-point conversion.Īs with many things, we are still at the start of the journey: I am sure over the coming years, we will see HLS increasingly used in different languages, making HLS similar to very low level of a software engineer’s C. For instance, it is difficult to synthesize and implement system calls, and we have to make sure everything is bounded and of a fixed size. Whereas HLS is still very much in the area of FPGA engineers who want to increase productivity.Īs with HDL, HLS has limitations when using C-based approaches, just like with traditional HDL you have to work with a subset of the language.
Recently it has become a reality with both major vendors, Altera and Xilinx offering HLS within their toolsets Spectra-Q and Vivado HLx respectively.Ī number of other C-based implementations are available, such as OpenCL which is designed for software engineers who want to achieve performance boosts by using a FPGA without a deep understanding of FPGA design. The ability to use C-based languages for FPGA design is brought about by HLS (high level synthesis), which has been on the verge of a breakthrough now for many years with tools like Handle-C and so on. The C, C++ or System C option allows us to leverage the capabilities of the largest devices while still achieving a semblance of a realistic development schedule… although that may just be my engineering management side coming out. Let’s take a look at what other tools we can use. Other options rather than these two languages exist for programming your FPGA.
#Cpu speed for fpga simulation plus
However, if you can describe and simulate, it’s not long before you want to turn those descriptions into physical gates.įor the last 20 plus years most designs have been developed using one or the other of these languages, with some quite nasty and costly language wars fought. Both of these “standard” HDLs emerged in the 1980s, initially intended only to describe and simulate the behavior of the circuit, not implement it. Specifically, two FPGA design languages have been used by most developers: VHDL and Verilog. Despite the recent push toward high level synthesis (HLS), hardware description languages (HDLs) remain king in field programmable gate array (FPGA) development.