Session 2: Hardware, FPGAs, and reconfigurable hardware

Since their first appearance, FPGAs have been widely used, studied, and enhanced. It makes it an attractive component for low-volume devices, for prototyping, and for efficient implementation exploiting its parallelism features. The design on FPGA also relies on methods and tools that improve productivity in a convinient way. In this session, an FPGA implementation of a flexible synchronizer for cognitive radio applications is presented. An FPGA is used for prototyping memory controllers and predictive cache for image processing algorithms. A methodology and tool for automatic generation of data-flow based reconfigurable accelerators is presented and used for MPEG Reconfigurable Video Coding applications. A new soft-core is implemented in a Zynq to show the benefit of offloading operating system services.