There's always another twist!
Good Grief Charlie Brown! It seems that some folks actually read the stuff I write. You can only imagine my surprise when I received the following:
Hi Max – I just read your little item regarding your DIY Calculator project at www.DIYCalculator.com mentioning fixed- and floating-point representations.
You may be interested in our high-level multi-threaded language and tool ("Mobius") which has built-in parameterizeable fixed- and floating-point representations. Mobius generates synthesizeable Verilog/VHDL, which makes it very easy to develop complex applications for FPGAs.
For example, here's a simple ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver using smallish floats (6-bit exponent, 8-bit mantissa) written in Mobius that compiles to Verilog/VHDL:
Most people can capture, test, and debug the above Mobius code in about 15 minutes. This compares pretty favorably with the equivalent Mobius-generated VHDL (which, at more than 6000 lines, is not something you would whip up during a coffee break!).
Benchmarks on FPGAs show that Mobius-generated applications are equal in speed and resources to the best hand-designed cores (commercial, academic, open source) that we have been able to find. ABB, Boeing, Cray and Darpa are using Mobius. Fast, easy to use, robust. What's not to like? You can find more info at www.codetronix.com.
Well, I for one am intrigued, and will be bouncing over to the Mobius website immediately. Perhaps we'll be able to persuade them to write a "How To" article for us? Until next time, have a good one!
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