SemiWiki: High-Level Synthesis and Open Source Software Algorithms

Excerpt from article: “High-Level Synthesis and Open Source Software Algorithms“

CircuitSutra is in the process of defining a robust methodology where an existing software implementation can be quickly implemented into silicon, creating a big game changer for the industry. Engineers at CircuitSutra migrated the open source C implementation of a Sobel filter to Verilog using a High Level Synthesis design flow.

For computer vision and image processing applications there’s an edge detection algorithm called a Sobel Filter, and it’s found on Github as Open Source. The filter generates a 2D map of the gradient, and it finds the direction of largest increase from light to dark, and then rates the change in that direction. At the top of the screen there’s a chart with an example starting image shown on the left, the gradients, and the filtered result.

The team then modified the C code for the Sobel Filter to make it work with the synthesizable subset, then generated Verilog code using the Siemens EDA catapult tool.

Read the entire article on SemiWiki originally published on July 14th, 2020.