We recently noticed on the Digilent Project Vault a cool project involving the Nexys 4 DDR and software programming. The project is called Hastlayer, and the mission is described below:
To allow software developers to be able to easily get the computational benefits of FPGAs we created Hastlayer: it turns software written for the .NET platform into an equivalent (VHDL) hardware description. It does this while also handling everything in the background to allow the usage of the resulting hardware in the same way as the original software was run – basically where there was a function call there’s still a function call but now it really executes on an FPGA, as logic hardware.
The project creator is Zoltán Lehóczky and his project is one of many awesome uses for the Nexys 4 DDR. The setup can be run with just the hardware or also be run with multiple boards. Its is really cool to see people doing projects with this FPGA, especially since his idea branches out from many of the conventional applications of the Nexys 4 DDR (such as for video and audio processing).
Make sure to go check out the full demo video below, and as always let us know if you have questions or projects you also would like to share!
To learn more about the Nexys 4 DDR, check out its introduction blog post here!
Thanks for writing about Hastlayer Miranda, I’m glad it caught your eye! We do think we’re in an exciting period where FPGA move from being kind of a specialty to be accessible to all software developers.