zoltan.lehoczky
Newbie level 2
We at my company have a research project that I think is quite cool and we're at the point to welcome others to try it: Hastlayer can automatically convert .NET assemblies into equivalent FPGA implementation to increase performance and decrease power consumption. Here's a short demo video on how a .NET developer would use it.
This is not a silver bullet of course but can provide substantial speed increase for CPU-bound, highly parallelizable algorithms while the power consumption of FPGAs remain in the order of magnitude of Watts (so if something is slower than on a CPU it can still be better performance/Watt-wise). And it's kind of seriously intriguing to write C# (or possibly any language compiled to .NET) and get wires and logic gates as the result.
Sounds interesting? If you have any questions or remarks, shoot here. If you want to play with it write us and you'll get access to it (you need to buy a $300 FPGA board too, but not from us, we picked some affordable board from a manufacturer to support first).
BTW I'm the lead developer of Hastlayer, having been writing tons of VHDL code generation logic in C#.
This is not a silver bullet of course but can provide substantial speed increase for CPU-bound, highly parallelizable algorithms while the power consumption of FPGAs remain in the order of magnitude of Watts (so if something is slower than on a CPU it can still be better performance/Watt-wise). And it's kind of seriously intriguing to write C# (or possibly any language compiled to .NET) and get wires and logic gates as the result.
Sounds interesting? If you have any questions or remarks, shoot here. If you want to play with it write us and you'll get access to it (you need to buy a $300 FPGA board too, but not from us, we picked some affordable board from a manufacturer to support first).
BTW I'm the lead developer of Hastlayer, having been writing tons of VHDL code generation logic in C#.