http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=945 A place to share, learn, and grow... en-US Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:20:49 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.2 q http://forums.leaflabs.com/search.php http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=945#post-5844 Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:48:24 +0000 poslathian 5844@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ <p>dreamcat, no offense to the very diligent rep from impulse, but we have no intention of fooling around with or promoting impulseC on our end. One of our goals with Oak is to start moving FPGAs in the free software direction - this would be counterproductive. </p> <p>Obviously the users are always free to use the product however they wish and hopefully share their work! However, if you are interested going from a more familiar programming environment to HDL I recommend myHDL (python-&gt;HDL). myHDL is free software and we have some experience with it. There is a good chance there will official support for using myHDL to write core for Oak, but I cannot guarantee that. </p> <p>Generally, though, the main utility of c/python-&gt;HDL compilers (particularly enterprise stuff like impulseC) is spot-accelerate large code bases - profile the code, find the bottlenecks, autocompile from c-&gt;hdl, and offload to FPGA. Right now, our main goal with Oak is integrating the FPGA into the rest of the Maple environment, not solving the HDL problem. However, I would like to devote some spare cycles towards a graphical programming tool for Oak - something with semantics similar to max/msp/PD. </p> http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=945#post-5839 Tue, 02 Aug 2011 11:55:12 +0000 BrianDur 5839@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ <p>Hi Dreamcat4,</p> <p>Impulse C supports all Spartan 3 devices. You can look at two reference designs by googling impulse c ready to run and checking out the Xilinx based examples. (yes, i work for Impulse). </p> <p>I'd like to tell you that you some magic language exists which makes hardware programming transparent to software folk. It ain't true. From the software description we can optimize your code but there is still a place and route phase in synthesis in which you either fall within the available resources or trip over hardware and need to iterate. it's getting easier but is not a "freebie" yet.</p> <p>feel free to bug us at info at impulseC. we'll even loan you a free license so you can try the spartan examples for yourself.</p> <p>Good luck,<br /> Brian at Impulse </p> http://forums.leaflabs.com/topic.php?id=945#post-5816 Sun, 31 Jul 2011 04:29:39 +0000 dreamcat4 5816@http://forums.leaflabs.com/ <p>Hi!<br /> I was wondering what people here think of the idea of using Impulse C to program FPGAs.</p> <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_C" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_C</a></p> <p>Noting that Xlinix Spartan 3E isnt listed there under the supported platforms.</p> <p>However as a follow on question - will Oak ever be likely to support something like this, rather than require intimate knowledge of a hardware description language for programming the FPGA component of the Oak platform?</p> <p>Ie given that Oak is mean to be CPU + FPGA combined, and are already programming the CPU part in C / C++ ? </p>