Embedded Linux and FPGAs accelerate embedded software development

The folks at LynuxWorks, who specialize in the embedded software market, and the folks at Impulse Accelerated Technologies, who specialize in software-to-FPGA tools, today announced technical collaboration, libraries, and reference examples combining the Impulse C-to-FPGA tools with LynuxWorks' BlueCat operating system.

This combination enables software developers to write C algorithms and easily refactor them for parallel processing on FPGA, a methodology that has shown 10 – 100X performance improvements in image, signal and data processing algorithms.

"Portability is a key differentiator for many of our customers," said Sonia Leal, Senior Product Manager at LynuxWorks. "BlueCat applications can be migrated to LynxOS real-time O/S for stricter, hard real time performance, with little or no rewriting. Similarly, C code for hardware accelerators that has been developed using Impulse CoDeveloper can be migrated easily to different FPGAs and even to different embedded processor interfaces such as Xilinx APU and FSL, without significant rewrite."

"As embedded software developers seek productivity, they require robust development platforms, tools and operating systems," stated David Buechner, Impulse Vice President. "In their first projects with a programmable platform, these programmers benefit greatly from software-oriented design tools including familiar C-language constructs."

The Impulse development environment increases productivity by providing C-language compilation, optimization and hardware generation for FPGAs. The tools also handle the hardware interconnections between embedded PowerPC and MicroBlaze processors and custom C-language hardware accelerators. This development method reduces the risks of experimenting with FPGAs while reducing time-to-market.

BlueCat Linux represents a highly stable, commercial-grade embedded operating system. BlueCat is available integrated with the Xilinx EDK for support of the available PowerPC and MicroBlaze cores. The Xilinx EDK provides a rich feature set for developing BlueCat Linux applications and configuring custom BSPs using Xilinx hardware designs.

A reference example demonstrating the combined Impulse and LynuxWorks tool flow for the Xilinx ML507 development kit is available at no charge from Impulse.