Reconfigurable Computing

Part IV. Application Development

Creating an efficient FPGA-based computation is similar to creating any other hardware. A designer carefully optimizes his or her computation to the needs of the underlying technology, exploiting the parallelism available while meeting resource and performance constraints. These designs are typically written in a hardware description language (HDL), such as Verilog, and CAD tools are then used to create the final implementation.

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) do have unique constraints and opportunities that must be understood in order for this technology to be employed most effectively. The resource mix is fixed, and the devices are never quite fast enough or have high enough capacity for what we want to ...