Firms integrate toolkit for hardware/software co-simulation

SAN FRANCISCO—South Korea's Dynalith Systems and Kirkland, Wash.-based Impulse Accelerated Technologies have integrated a new tool kit for engineers simulating and prototyping high performance computer systems, the companies said.

Based on Xilinx FPGAs, the kit supports a full development path from Visual Studio, GCC, and other compilers, through hardware/software partitioning to a deployable FPGA-based development board., according to the companies.

The integrated tool flow streamlines development by creating an environment for hardware/software partitioning experimentation, and by automatically generating APIs, the companies said.

Software developers in particular are looking to accelerate algorithms in programmable platforms, but have been traditionally limited by the complexities of generating appropriate hardware interfaces to streams, signals memories and I/O, which are automated by the new kit, the companies said.

The main benefit from this integration is to run host programs along with logic operating in FPGA fabric, the companies said.

A wide range of host programs are available as a part of Impulse C, including royalty-free, ready to run image processing, financial, math and scientific programs, according to the companies.

"We see the advent of stable APIs between FPGA hardware and software elements as a major step towards FPGAs extending their reach into the traditional domains of software developers," said Ando Ki, Dynalith R&D director, in a statement. "We see tools like Impulse C as the missing link in this process— enabling software developers to adapt high speed, single- or dual-streaming algorithms to the incredibly broad I/O architecture of FPGAs."