Abstract
Development of FPGA-based, network-enabled embedded systems in Register Transfer Level hardware description languages is tedious. Despite the automation of this process with numerous EDA tools available, no well-established design patterns exist. Moreover, the entire production cycle requires appropriate theoretical background and hardware design intuition from the developer which discourages the software community. To improve productivity and minimize time to market when assembling such systems, we propose a new hardware/software co-design approach to building reconfigurable hardware web services. The proposed integrated development platform features a programmable FPGA board where computations of different nature and purpose are logically distributed among a sequential soft-core processor program, a massively parallel accelerator and an independent communication module that handles remote clients’ requests. Our second contribution is a set of tools that make the development of the aforementioned services essentially a software design undertaking with the extensive use of high-level programming languages. The platform has been tuned to act as a flexible runtime environment for image processing services, thus providing functionality of an intelligent camera. Two example services built from scratch according to the new methodology are discussed. Reduced development time and significant performance gain observed prove validity of the proposed approach and unveil a large potential of the assembled prototype.
Highlights
In a modern fast-paced environment humans are more and more heavily dependent on various types of embedded devices, such as smart sensors or cameras
In this paper we present an integrated development platform that dramatically simplifies the process of building reconfigurable, Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based services according to the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm [11]
Without compromising the generality of the architecture and the design methodologies adopted, we demonstrate our approach in a machine vision domain by tuning the platform to provide functionality of an intelligent camera
Summary
In a modern fast-paced environment humans are more and more heavily dependent on various types of embedded devices, such as smart sensors or cameras. The need for processing large volumes of data and the growing popularity of the “Internet of things” concept will strengthen this tendency in the forthcoming decades In this context the traditional computing paradigms relying on the stationary infrastructure often no longer match our expectations in terms of the quality of service and/or response time. Such stationary systems enforce the model of computation in which the role of sensors is reduced to merely data acquisition This in turn means suboptimal resource utilization, large communication overhead and increased costs. In this paper we present an integrated development platform that dramatically simplifies the process of building reconfigurable, FPGA-based services according to the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm [11].
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