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Practical FPGA Programming in C (Prentice Hall Modern Semiconductor Design Series' Sub...
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by David Pellerin and Scott Thibault
Sales Rank: 181976
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Discount: 25 %
$59.99
At Amazon
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Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR May 2, 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0131543180
ISBN-13: 978-0131543188
Product Dimensions:
9.3 x 7.3 x 1.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
http://www.ImpulseC.com/practical to download fully operational, time-limited versions of a C-based FPGA design compiler, as well as additional examples and programming tips.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
About The Author
Author Bio
David Pellerin is president and founder of Impulse Accelerated Technologies, a firm that serves systems designers who want to use FPGAs for hardware-based software acceleration and fast prototyping of mixed hardware/software systems. His Prentice Hall PTR books include VHDL Made Easy, Practical Design Using Programmable Logic, Digital Design Using ABEL, and Electronic Design Automation for Windows. Scott Thibault is president and founder of Green Mountain Computing Systems, developers of custom and OEM software that leverages advanced HDL and C-to-RTL expertise to improve time-to-market. Dr. Thibault holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rennes.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
Customer Reviews & Comments
Let's start on the positive side. This book is very current - it mentions the recent Cray and SGI FPGA accelerators as part of the reason for programmers to learn about FPGAs. It goes through some interesting and practical examples, showing how a C program can be used to specify the synthesizable logic for triple DES, including time/space tradeoffs. It gives some hardware awareness, without trying to turn a programmer into an EE. Best of all, it shows practical use of Impulse C, an ANSI C extension that supports pragma-driven pipelining and parallelism. Impulse C, by the way, seems to have an exceptional pedigree. It seems to descend from Maya Gokhale's work at Los Alamos, and there isn't much better parentage for such a product to claim. There are some problems with this book, however. It relies overwhelmingly on the Impulse C product, to the exclusion of Handel C and a flock of other products - it's really an Impulse C how-to. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not what I assumed from the title. It emphasizes streaming data, like radar input, video, audio, or all the other traditional DSP applications of FPGAs. Streaming is good, but a poor match to the Cray and SGI coprocessors. The biggest problems in this book come from the basic approach of trying to turn an FPGA into a CPU. Back when iron was first introduced for bridge-building, iron beams were built to imitate wooden ones. The result was a wooden bridge made of iron. It worked, but used far more material than was needed for the job, and got relatively poor performance from the material. Ditto what happens when FPGA logic goes into a soft CPU. The result is a little like the classic "Fortran program written in C," only worse. Andre deHon, in his FCCM `04 talk on hardware design patterns, identified the FPGA CPU as one of the biggest anti-patterns in his lexicon (though he didn't use the word anti-pattern). Creating a CPU makes the FPGA look familiar to a C programmer, but is a great way to turn the FPGA's inherent parallelism into serial execution, and far slower than the host CPU's at that. The FPGA CPU re-introduces the "memory wall." A big Xilinx FPGA has 300-400 on-chip memories that can be accessed independently and concurrently. You can (I did) build a dual-ported RAM with 1000-bit words. You can (I did) create a 64-way interleave, so all data for a 3D tricubic interpolation can be accessed in one cycle. You can (I did) create scratch buffers for hundreds of concurrent computations. You can create all kinds of wild structures with massive performance - or you can reinvent the 16-bit von Neumann bottleneck. (Soft CPUs aren't inherently evil, there are good uses for them. Mostly, I'd rather use the same logic for 100 parallel, dedicated processing elements instead of one serial PE.) If you need to use Impulse C, there's probably no other book around. If you're a programmer trying to learn about hardware, I suggest Wirth's aging "Digital Circuit Design for Computer Science Students." I recommend this book only to people with product-specific needs. //wiredweird
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Practical FPGA Programming in C (Prentice Hall Modern Semiconductor Design Series' Sub...
Discount: 25 %
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Price: $59.99
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