Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/H051155/1
Title:	Softcore Streaming Processors for FPGA
Principal Investigator:	McAllister, Professor J
Other Investigators:	Woods, Professor RF
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Sch of Electronics, Elec Eng & Comp Sci
Organisation:	Queen's University of Belfast
Scheme:	Standard Research
Starts:	01 October 2010	Ends:	28 February 2014	Value (£):	450,323
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	VLSI Design
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Electronics
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 16 Mar 2010 ICT Prioritisation Panel (March 10) Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Modern FPGA represent the pinnacle of the embedded device market for computationally intensive applications; providing an unprecedented 1.2TMACs of fixed-point on-chip performance, and 28Tbits/s memory bandwidth, they offer massive resources with which to build embedded realisations of applications such as Digital Signal Processing (DSP), and the ability to optimise the cost of the embedded architecture in an application specific manner.They are, however, critically hamstrung by programming problems. In stark contrast to the software-based programming style of the majority of alternative devices, FPGA normally require the use of hardware design languages and techniques to derive the best implementation.This project proposes a new approach to solve this problem for FPGA DSP. Having shown that simple programmable processors can achieve real-time performance and cost similar to dedicated hardware on FPGA, we propose a project which uses these processors to build FPGA DSP architectures. We propose to develop an ultra-efficient processor architecture and a design methodology to translate a dataflow graph DSP application model into a heterogeneous network of the simple processors, tailored to the application requirements. Further, we will automate this process and apply to real world application demonstrators from our industrial partners Xilinx Inc., the FPGA device market leader and National Instruments, a premier global supplied of FPGA embedded products.
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Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.qub.ac.uk