FPGA’s are now so powerful and low cost that they are a realistic alternative to DSPs  in a wide range of applications including video and signal processing, and  many companies are turning to FPGA devices to meet their production needs.

Programming model  for FPGAs is becoming increasingly important for the following reasons:

1. The increasing gate count and complexity of FPGAs is no longer compatible with a fast time-to-market if you require a small army of hardware engineers and significant time to program the device.  Designers are demanding a quick way of implementing their functionality into the device that meets the market requirements in terms of cost and performance. The ability to efficiently use the fabric and to rapidly integrate with the rest of the platform is critical.
2. Many FPGA design teams, especially in video and imaging market, are focused on differentiating using unique algorithms and are looking for a C-based flow, since they don’t have access to hardware designers.  Moreover, DSP designers moving to FPGAs are used to C programming environments. 
3. Increasingly, systems implemented on FPGAs contain embedded processors, and designers are demanding a uniform programming environment for processors and FPGA fabric.

PICO Algorithmic Synthesis creates application accelerators from untimed C for complex processing hardware  in the video, imaging, wireless and security domains.  The PICO Platform offers the highest possible level of abstraction for large designs and has been proven to provide huge productivity gains on the largest production designs, not just on small blocks. PICO delivers QoR competitive to manual design using  a unique parallelizing compiler and multi-level hierarchical abstraction.

PICO Extreme FPGA integrates with the back-end tools and provides a seamless end-to-end path from a C algorithm to a bit-stream that can be downloaded onto a board.  It  has been tailored to meet the requirements of FPGA designers;  for example, the PICO Platform automatically takes advantage of embedded DSP units.

PICO Extreme FPGA has been proven to deliver efficient application accelerators for high performance applications directly from a C algorithm without the need for RTL programming, which is labor intensive and error prone.

As a result, FPGA design teams can get to market rapidly with cost effective, differentiated products.