High performance stream processing on FPGA

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) have plentiful computational, communication and member bandwidth resources which may be combined into high-performance, low-cost accelerators for computationally demanding operations. However, deriving efficient accelerators currently requires manual register transfer level design-a highly time-consuming and unproductive process. Softwareprogrammable processors are a promising way to alleviate this design burden but are unable to support performance and cost comparable to hand-crafted custom circuits. A novel type of processor is described which overcomes this shortcoming for streaming operations. It employs a fine-grained processor with very high levels of customisability and advanced program control and memory addressing capabilities in very large-scale custom multicore networks to enable accelerators whose performance and cost match those of hand-crafted custom circuits and well beyond comparable soft processors.