System-Level Design for FPGAs

Summary form only given. Today's FPGA applications are made up of many different functional elements; hardware blocks, software modules, I/O functions and on-chip interconnect fabrics are four major categories of these elements. I will explore some of the characteristics of these categories in order to provide insight into how the creation, or synthesis, of these functional elements can be automated as much as possible. In particular I will focus on unique benefits and challenges FPGAs present when considering such system design tools. The ideas will be illustrated by examples taken from applications in the networking and the image processing areas. These examples will illustrate progress to date as well as highlighting important areas of focus for future developments.