FPGA-Based Algorithm Acceleration for Software Designers

This paper describes a project that was based on a new solution offered by SBS Technologies and Celoxica. Allowing software designers to harness FPGA power, without the need for in-depth hardware expertise (though it does require an interesting learning experience in basic FPGA operation). The solution consists of a SBS' high performance Tsunami FPGA PCI board that installs simply in any PC, and Celoxica's PDP Handel C development environment, which allows programming in a variant of the standard "C" familiar to software designers. The project was achieved by an applications software team with no experience with FPGA programming.