Nios II C-to-Hardware Acceleration compiler

Features: Altera Corporation has launched a new
productivity tool for developers of Nios II-based systems Nios II C-to-Hardware
Acceleration (C2H) compiler. 



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.

It 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 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.