FPGA design flows for improved productivity, performance, and energy

数字技术在现代产品中发挥着关键作用，从消费品到广播和医疗设备，再到工业控制。在使用数字技术开发产品时，通常有两种方法：软件和硬件。在软件方法中，设计包括一个微处理器，并且通过编写在处理器上执行的软件程序来实现所需的独特功能。这种方法在实践中被普遍使用，因为它是直接的，并且软件人员是广泛可用的；他们的数量是硬件开发者的10倍。但是处理器有两个很大的缺点：它们消耗大量的能量，并且与硬件相比不能提供高性能。在这个项目中，我们打算改善这些问题，通过使硬件设计的好处对软件开发人员可用。

Digital technology plays a key role in modern products, from consumer items to broadcast and medical equipment, to industrial control. When developing a product using digital technology, two approaches are prevalent: software and hardware. In the software approach the design includes a microprocessor, and the unique features needed are implemented by writing software programs that are executed on the processor. This approach is commonly-used in practice, because it is straightforward and software personnel are widely available; they outnumber hardware developers by about 10x. But processors have two big drawbacks: they use a lot of energy, and do not provide high performance in comparison to hardware. In this project we intend to ameliorate these issues, by making the benefits of hardware design available to software developers.