Building zynq® accelerators with Vivado® high level synthesis

Abstract

Engineering complex systems inevitably requires a designer to balance many conflicting design requirements including performance, cost, power, and design time. In many cases, FPGAs enable engineers to balance these design requirements in ways not possible with other technologies like ASICs, ASSPs, GPUs or general purpose processors. This tutorial will focus on two of the newest commercial FPGA-related technologies, High Level Synthesis (HLS) and Programmable Logic integrated tightly with high performance embedded processors. In particular, we will present a detailed introduction to Vivado HLS, which is capable of synthesizing optimized FPGA circuits from algorithmic descriptions in C, C++ and SystemC. We will also present an introduction to the architecture of Zynq devices and show how interesting system architectures can be constructed using High Level Synthesis and the programmable logic portion of these devices.