Practical FPGA Programming in C

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 ...