Comment Re:Thoughts From A Professional FPGA Developer (Score 1) 153
CoreFire(tm) is a graphical language whose primary purpose is to allow both hardware engineers and non-hardwarwe engineers to develop FPGA applications quickly.
While typical HDL's are designed to describe a fundamentally parallel process using procedural structures, CoreFire(tm) represents parallel structures as parallel structures using a data flow paradigm.
CoreFire(tm) provides a large body of ready-to-use cores that are optimized for speed on FPGA's. You don't need to understand anything about how to implement an FFT on an FPGA, all you need to do is route the data from wherever it is coming from to the core.
Where CoreFire(tm) truly shines, however, is in it's ability to create distributed control structures that are correct by construction. My experience with the development of FPGA applications is that building the computations is really the easy part. The hard part is getting the data into the system from the outside world, managing the data as it gets routed between various computations, and then getting it back out into the outside world. Typical HDL's encourage centralized control structures that have to be designed when you've got your computations all ready to go. With CoreFire(tm) you just draw out your computation as a dataflow graph and CoreFire(tm) produces the control that you need automatically.
While typical HDL's are designed to describe a fundamentally parallel process using procedural structures, CoreFire(tm) represents parallel structures as parallel structures using a data flow paradigm.
CoreFire(tm) provides a large body of ready-to-use cores that are optimized for speed on FPGA's. You don't need to understand anything about how to implement an FFT on an FPGA, all you need to do is route the data from wherever it is coming from to the core.
Where CoreFire(tm) truly shines, however, is in it's ability to create distributed control structures that are correct by construction. My experience with the development of FPGA applications is that building the computations is really the easy part. The hard part is getting the data into the system from the outside world, managing the data as it gets routed between various computations, and then getting it back out into the outside world. Typical HDL's encourage centralized control structures that have to be designed when you've got your computations all ready to go. With CoreFire(tm) you just draw out your computation as a dataflow graph and CoreFire(tm) produces the control that you need automatically.
