Kirkland, Wa.— Designers working with Xilinx Inc.'s Virtex-4 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) can create hardware-accelerated applications that can dramatically outperform applications running on traditional microprocessors with Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc.'s CoDeveloper C-to-hardware design tool.

CoDeveloper for Virtex-4 allows software programmers and FPGA designers to describe parallel algorithms for image processing, DSP, encryption and other processing-intensive applications using standard C language. Software programmers are given independent access to a wide range of FPGAs by allowing hardware accelerators to be compiled directly from C software descriptions.

The Impulse C compiler translates specific C-language subroutines to low-level FPGA-hardware while optimizing the generated logic and identifying opportunities for parallelism and acceleration. The compiler analyzes untimed C code and collapses multiple C statements and operations into single-clock instruction stages.

CoDeveloper also allows software programmers to use standard C development tools for algorithm verification and desktop simulation and generate synthesizable hardware descriptions for selected C subroutine and processes. They can also easily identify processing bottlenecks and accelerate designs by optimizing the generated hardware for the selected Virtex-4 platform.

Impulse C is capable of generating the required Virtex-4 FPGA interfaces for software to hardware communications using an auxiliary processing unit (APU) interface. The APU provides direct access to hardware accelerators from instructions executing in software on the embedded IBM PowerPC 405 CPU.

"The Xilinx Virtex-4 provides a great platform for accelerating embedded applications," said David Pellerin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Impulse. "By providing software programmers with a path from C code to FPGA hardware, we make it possible for embedded software applications to be accelerated dramatically, using familiar software design methods to target the Virtex-4 platform."

Impulse CoDeveloper for Xilinx Virtex-4 is available now with prices starting from $4,995 for a perpetual, single-user license.

Impulse Accelerated Technologies Inc.,1-425-576-4066, www.impulsec.com