Practical FPGA Programming in C

Chapter 6. Generating FPGA Hardware

The preceding two chapters presented a method of programming, using the Impulse C libraries, that emphasizes a streams-oriented approach to application partitioning and that supports parallelism at the system level. This approach supports the concept of coarse-grained parallelism and allows us to abstract away the details of the actual target platform.

In actual practice, however, we need to be aware of the limitations of the target platform (the FPGA and any related IP components, such as embedded soft processors), and we need to understand how to write C code that can be efficiently compiled to either a processor or an FPGA, as appropriate. In this chapter we'll begin that process of understanding by describing ...