Software tests and compiles C applications

Impulse's CoDeveloper makes it possible to describe, test and compile C language applications.

Impulse Accelerated Technologies has release of Impulse CoDeveloper for Virtex II Pro.

CoDeveloper makes it possible to describe, test and compile C language applications, partitioning them between the Virtex II Pro's embedded PowerPC processor and dedicated hardware running within the FPGA itself, without the need to write low-level VHDL or Verilog.

The automated hardware generation capabilities of CoDeveloper dramatically reduce the time required to develop FPGA-based system prototypes and products.

The Impulse C libraries included with CoDeveloper allow FPGA algorithms to be developed using popular C/C++ development environments including Microsoft Visual Studio, Metrowerks CodeWarrior and open-source GCC-based tools.

CoDeveloper's Application Monitor adds debugging visualisations for highly parallel, multi-process applications - helping identify dataflow bottlenecks and other areas for acceleration.

CoDeveloper automates hardware/software interface creation and generates synthesisable HDL outputs compatible with popular FPGA synthesis and simulation tools.

This makes it possible to create high-performance, mixed hardware/software applications for the Virtex II Pro platform without the need to write low-level VHDL or Verilog code.

CoDeveloper generates readable, synthesisable HDL outputs and is intended for use alongside (rather than replacing) existing HDL tools and tool flows.

"CoDeveloper is an excellent complement to existing software and FPGA development tools", said David Pellerin, Impulse co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.

"Impulse C is a powerful way to express parallelism at the system level - within the context of standard ANSI C - while the CoDeveloper compiler frees programmers from the drudgery of extracting process-level parallelism and creating equivalent HDL code".

The CoDeveloper tools provide a natural bridge between C language programming and FPGA hardware design.

Impulse users report dramatic reductions (days or weeks instead of months) in the time required to create prototype hardware from C language software.

The addition of Virtex II Pro support extends CoDeveloper's powerful C to RTL capabilities to allow the design of mixed hardware/software applications using embedded Power PC processors.

Interfaces to the PowerPC (using the provided processor local bus, or PLB) are automatically created by CoDeveloper for hardware/software communication, and all hardware/software files required for integration with Xilinx EDK tools are also generated.

Support for the Xilinx MicroBlaze processor is also included as a standard feature of CoDeveloper for Xilinx Virtex II Pro.

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