Italian Company Releases Tool for FPGA Designs

The compiler, called HCE (HARWEST Compiling Environment) is the outcome of a 4-year industrial research project (HARWEST) funded by the Italian ministry for university and research (MUR) in the frame of a program purposely launched for stimulating the growth of spin-offs from public institutions.

HCE allows the design of very efficient parallel computing systems, described at the VHDL-RTL, starting from algorithm specifics given in the ANSI-C language. HCE leverages on the Microsoft VisualStudio compiling platform which allows users to access the classical facilities of an advanced IDE (i.e. code editing, debugging with breakpoints, dynamic code and memory inspection and editing, etc.); the extension to the Linux platform is currently under development.

HCE allows customers with demanding computing applications to easily access and use the power and flexibility of FPGA computing. Furthermore, HCE will significantly shorten the development time of custom products, avoiding the very error-prone and time-consuming process of the low level hardware design and debug. For additional information please visit the company website.