Implementing Hastlayer support for Xilinx SoC Zynq FPGA family
Ernő Dávid, Dávid El-Saig, Zoltán Lehóczky and Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi (2021.12.01 - 2022.08.31)
Wigner RCP and Lombiq Technologies Ltd. cooperation
Abstract: Hastlayer by Lombiq Technologies allows software developers of the .NET platform to utilize FPGAs as compute accelerators. It converts standard .NET constructs into equivalent hardware implementations, automatically enhancing the performance while lowering the power consumption of suitable algorithms. Developers keep writing .NET programs as usual, no hardware design knowledge is required.
Hastlayer needs dedicated firmware and software components for each supported hardware platforms. In collaboration with Wigner RC there are already several supported platforms (like Microsoft Catapult cards and the Xilinx Alveo FPGA card family). The aim of the next development phase is to enable Hastlayer support for embedded platforms like FPGA cards based on the Xilinx Zynq family members.
Wigner's task is to develop the necessary firmware framework to run the Hastlayer-generated hardware cores and if there is a need then customize the Linux operating system running on the embedded ARM CPU cores.