Bringing FPGA design to application domain experts

Abstract

Summary form only given: Field-programmable technology has enabled extensible real-time embedded system development for application domain experts by: a) providing efficient concurrent access to I/O resources with great deterministic timing control; b) improving productivity in taking a domain expert's design to hardware implementation; c) offering reconfigurability to allow the domain expert to explore different design choices; d) increasing reliability of certain applications (e.g. aerospace) over traditional processor-oriented implementations. Enabling field-programmable technology [FPGAs] for application domain experts creates interesting challenges for tool providers. In particular, the tool provider needs to abstract details of the FPGA, so that the domain expert gets the benefits stated above, while avoiding the complexity of RTL design that is characteristic of traditional FPGA design flows. NI Lab VIEW (FPGA] is a graphical system design tool specifically developed to address these challenges. It lets domain experts productively design, prototype, and deploy efficient systems that are correct by construction. We share key technical and business insights gained in developing and productizing NI LabVIEW, such as [a] a graphical model of computation suitable for hardware design, [b] a tightly coupled hardware/software platform offering that embraces reconfigurability, and [c] synthesis and deployment on commercial FPGA targets. We also share our vision for such tools and platforms in the future, and discuss what we believe remain as key challenges for the FPT research community.