Connectal Rationale
===================

Are you happy with the connection between software development and
hardware development on your projects? Do you wish you had more
flexible tools for developing test benches, drivers, and applications
using your hardware? Do you wish you didn't need a kernel driver?

Do you wish that you could use a common flow to drive your hardware
development, across simulation, timing verification, FPGA
implementation, and even the ASIC back end?

Do you wish you could use a better programming language to implement
the hardware? Do you miss declared interfaces and structural types?

Do you wish you had better tools for debugging the hardware? For
reflecting conditions encountered on the hardware back into the
simulation environment where you can drill down into the problem?

These are the kinds of problems we encountered which inspired us to
develop the Connectal framework. With Connectal, we are trying to
bring the productivity of software engineering practices to hardware
development without compromising on the performance of the hardware.

Connectal provides:

 * Seamless development environment with test benches and apps written in C/C++
 * Streamlined application structure
 * Faster builds and greater visibility simulating hardware in bluesim/modelsim/xsim
 * Support for capture traces on interfaces and replaying them in test benches