Practical FPGA Programming in C

Chapter 14. The Future of FPGA Computing

Throughout most of this book we've presented FPGAs as relatively small computing elements capable of accelerating key algorithms for embedded systems and, to some extent, for more esoteric scientific applications (the fractal image generator being one such example). FPGAs have become increasingly useful for such applications as the cost of the devices has fallen and as their densities have increased. You have also seen how the use of software programming methods, and C programming in particular, can simplify the creation of hardware-accelerated systems—systems in which the FPGA serves as a computational resource alongside other, more traditional processing resources.

Looking forward, it seems increasingly ...