High-Level Design Tools for Floating Point FPGAs

Abstract

This tutorial describes tools for efficiently implementing floating point applications on FPGAs. We present both the SDK for OpenCL and DSP Builder Advanced Blockset and show that they can be effectively used to implement many floating point applications. The methods for optimizing application performance are also described. In this tutorial we focus on a few applications, including Fast Fourier transform, matrix multiplication, finite impulse response filter and a Cholesky decomposition. In all cases we show what the tools are capable of achieving, and more importantly how a user can take advantage of the various floating-point centric features that are made available. We also discuss how these tools can automatically use FPGA architectural features such as hardened floating-point DSP available on Altera Arria 10 family.