FAQs
What is an FPGA?
A field programmable gate array (FPGA) is an electronic processing device, similar to a CPU or GPU. Unlike a CPU or GPU, which executes software instructions, an FPGA performs processing in hardware.
What are the advantages of using FPGAs?
By processing data in hardware FPGAs can perform the same task an order of magnitude faster while using orders of magnitude less energy than more traditional processors.
So, if they're so great, why doesn't everyone use FPGAs?
Traditionally, FPGAs have been programmed at the circuit level using low-level hardware description languages (HDLs), such as Verilog and VHDL.
HDLs are designed to be used by highly skilled electronic hardware engineers, with knowledge of digitial circuit dynamics. Additionally, HDLs are extremely verbose requiring systems to be described at the level of individual circuit connections. Debugging a HDL program requires analysis of the individual signals flowing around the circuit. This is extremely cumbersome and difficult even for experts.
Due their low-level nature, it takes much longer to produce a working system in a HDL (even for hardware engineers with extensive expertise) when compared to the higher-level programming languages most developers are used to.
Therefore, the costs of implementing systems in HDLs mean FPGAs have only been used for niche applications, with almost no uptake from the traditional software development industry.
What does Linespeed Systems offer that solves these issues?
Linespeed Systems have built an integrated platform and development stack specifically for building and running custom hardware acceleration systems using FPGAs.
First is the development stack. The core of the development stack is Linespeed Systems' Jet language. Which has been specifically designed around a set of abstractions and semantics to super charge development of hardware accelerators. Developers can utilise terse, high-level concepts and techniques which will be much more familar to software developers, making them more productive. When debugging, programs written in Jet can be stepped through line-by-line just like a traditional debugger.
The Linespeed cloud platform is tightly integrated with the Jet language. Offering fully-managed CI/CD infrastructure, hardware accelerator management and optimised production environments.
These two core pillars enable developers to rapidly build custom hardware accelerators and take them from development to production.