Impulse Accelerated Technologies has revealed that its CoDeveloper C-to-FPGA compiler has been updated to support the latest devices and software from Xilinx, including the newest Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs and Version 11.2 of Xilinx ISE Design Suite software.
The Impulse C-to-FPGA tools reportedly allow application developers to create custom accelerator and filter modules in C, increasing productivity for developers of video and image processing, DSP, and hardware-accelerated computing applications.
CoDeveloper 3.6 enables embedded co-processing with the latest Xilinx MicroBlaze and PowerPC processor cores. CoDeveloper decreases design risk by allowing applications to be verified using standard C debuggers, the company said.
CoDeveloper also allows users to verify the generated hardware via an automated C-to-HDL test bench conversion option that is compatible with Mentor ModelSim and other HDL simulators.
The company said that the Impulse C-to-FPGA compiler converts C-language applications to either VHDL or Verilog compatible with FPGA synthesis tools including Xilinx ISE, Synopsys Synplify, and Mentor Precision. The generated HDL is also compatible with Mentor ModelSim and other HDL simulators.
Additionally, the new offering is said to allow users of Xilinx Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs to: preserve application compatibility with Visual Studio, Eclipse, and GCC and other common C language tools; generate I/O including streams, signals, memories and registers; and create processor interfaces using PLB, APU and FSL bus interconnections.
Brian Durwood, co-founder of Impulse, said: Compatibility with standard C and VHDL is increasingly important to developers of embedded systems. The biggest body of intellectual property is in standard C, so maintaining compatibility with popular C-language tools is key to increasing reuse and portability of custom hardware modules.
