Fpgas for Software Programmers

This book makes powerful Field Programmable Gate

Array (FPGA) and reconfigurable technology accessible to software engineers by

covering different state-of-the-art high-level synthesis approaches (e.g.,

OpenCL and several C-to-gates compilers). It introduces FPGA technology, its

programming model, and how various applications can be implemented on FPGAs

without going through low-level hardware design phases. Readers will get a

realistic sense for problems that are suited for FPGAs and how to implement

them from a software designer's point of view.

The authors demonstrate that FPGAs and their programming model reflect

the needs of stream processing problems much traditional CPU or GPU

architectures, making them well-suited for a wide variety of systems, from

embedded systems performing sensor processing to large setups for Big Data

number crunching. This book serves as an

invaluable tool for software designers and FPGA design engineers who are interested

in high design productivity through behavioural synthesis, domain-specific

compilation, and FPGA overlays.

Introduces FPGA technology to software

developers by giving an overview of FPGA programming models and design tools,

as well as various application examples;



Provides a holistic analysis of the topic and

enables developers to tackle the architectural needs for Big Data processing

with FPGAs;



Explains the reasons for the energy efficiency

and performance benefits of FPGA processing;



Provides a user-oriented

approach and a sense for where and how to apply FPGA technology.

Dirk Koch is a lecturer in the Advanced Processor Technologies Group at the University of Manchester. His main research interest is on run-time reconfigurable systems based on FPGAs, including methods, tools and applications. Current research projects include database acceleration using FPGAs based on stream processing as well as reconfigurable instruction set extensions for CPUs. Dirk was a program co-chair of the FPL2012 conference and he is a program committee member of many FPGA related conferences and workshops. He is author of the book Partial Reconfiguration on FPGAs, he holds two patents, and he has (co-)authored over 50 conference and journal publications. 

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About Dirk Koch