Building an Acceleration Overlay for Novice Students
Shrikant S. Jadhav, Noah LaMoyne, Alan A. Chen, Clay Gloster, Dylan Yang, Sunmin Yun, Young-Soo Kim · 2018
Over the past decade, many students and developers have adopted high-level synthesis in order to help with their design goals and project development. Computer languages such as Python has been widely utilized as description language for development due to emphasis on code readability and reduction of coding time. Since high-level languages can allow users to worry less about memory and data management and more about implementations, users can emphasize on learning and accomplishing a subject in a timely manner without the need to develop for an extensively long period of time. The need to develop tools necessary for close the gap between the software and hardware design will enable more people to contribute to the utilization of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) educational project. This paper presents the benefits of using Python on FPGAs via the Jupyter Notebooks and process of designing a Python overlay on the Xilinx PYNQ-Zl board, consisting of a Zynq All Programmable System on Chips (APSoCs) and an ARM-Cortex A9 processor.