Xilinx has released a press release with some details on their recent acquisition of High-Level Synthesis vendor AutoESL. AutoESL's AutoPilot tool will now be intergrated into the Xilinx toolchain. And, you guessed right, there will no longer be an Altera back-end
This aquisition is a very interesting development, and one that is likely to have many consequences. First, there are currently many players in the c-to-gates world that have been competing for a slice of the FPGA design market (AutoESL, Pico -now Synopsis-, Harwest CE, Impulse-C, Catapult C, etc etc). With one of these tools now part of the standard Xilinx toolchain, one wonders what future is left for the other products within the Xilinx world. 2nd, with one c-to-gates already present in the standard Xilinx toolchain, this C-to-gates is likely to generate a standard coding style for C programs that are to be translated into Xilinx FPGA hardware. IMHO this would be good as it would mean increased compatibility and portability. And finally, particularly if included in the xilinx university program, it is likely to considerably increase the user base of c-to-gates tools.
As always, only time will tell, but it seems there will be some interesting movements in the future. It will also be interesting to see if Altera is going to follow a similar route now.
Hi Miquel,
ReplyDeleteFor our two cents we are all for standardization. FPGAs in general struggle with a compile path that takes longer and requires tools less integrated than microprocessors, GPUs or DSPs. In our experience before we are competing with other companies like ourselves, we are competing with the 99% of software developers that won't even consider compiling their code to hardware.
Brian Durwood, Impulse CEO
Thanks for your reply, Brian!
ReplyDeleteCertainly it is more difficult to provide an integrated toolchain for FPGAs, but I believe we should at least try to do, even if the result is not optimal at first. One of the things that developers prefer to avoid is dealing with multiple incompatible hardware and software infrastructures. Portability to other platforms -and also to future platforms- is a key consideration before making an investment, so if we can improve this then we may also have a better chance to convince those 99% of software developers that do not care about hardware.
Miquel