Altera launches new productivity tool

BANGALORE: Altera Corporation has launched a new productivity tool for developers of Nios II-based systems Nios II C-to-Hardware Acceleration (C2H) compiler. The tool increases the performance of the developer's embedded software.

The SOPC solution provider is also providing third-party tools vendors with access to its system-level infrastructure, including the Quartus II SOPC Builder tool, to help development of a wide range of Electronic System Level (ESL) design tools.

The Nios II C2H Compiler leverages Altera's system-level infrastructure to deliver substantial performance improvement across a broad range of applications.

The new tool automatically converts performance-critical C language subroutines into hardware accelerators, and integrates them into FPGA-based Nios II subsystems, reducing development time from weeks to minutes.

The Nios II C2H Compiler enables Nios II users to improve system performance with minimal increases in resource utilization. In fact, the Nios II C2H Compiler delivers performance between 10 and 45 times greater than non-accelerated software, yet only requires additional logic of 0.7 to 2.0 times the size of the processor alone, across a set of software applications including autocorrelation, bit allocation, convolution encoder, color space conversion and fast Fourier transform (FFT).

The Nios II C2H Compiler is a plug-in to the Eclipse-based Nios II integrated development environment (IDE), giving developers a consistent interface. All hardware-accelerator generation tasks performed by the Nios II C2H Compiler are invoked and run from within the Nios II IDE, ensuring that users have a single tool interface for the entire acceleration flow. After profiling their application, users right-click to accelerate time-critical functions using the Nios II C2H Compiler, generating hardware accelerators that automatically link into the software flow.

The Nios II C2H Compiler is currently shipping to beta customers and will be available for general release in May 2006. It will be delivered as an integrated plug-in to the Nios II IDE.

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