Field-Programmable Gate Arrays in Embedded Systems Development

Pedro Amaro

Embedded Systems are becoming omnipresent in our daily lives. These types of devices may be commonly found both in our daily and work lives. As an example, devices with a small microcontroller, sensors, actuators and communication modules, are the backbone of the Internet of Things. Within this context, the use of field programmable devices, (e.g. FPGAs), may be an interesting add-on due to their ability to perform fast and powerful computations within the context of small devices powered by relatively simple microcontrollers. Moreover, FPGAs provide system implementation flexibility while maintaining its powerful computation ability.

Moreover, the so-called Embedded Systems are usually developed by professionals who are recruited from both electrical and computer engineers as well as computer science graduates. These professionals work in a border theme that lies between the electrical and computer engineering and the computer science fields, often using different languages and concepts for the same ideas.

This talk addresses the topic of computation techniques from the “hardware” perspective to be introduced to computer science minds. Using hardware-level development techniques and tools, a simple computational algorithm is developed and implemented with software-like concepts. "