Connectal Project

Connectal consists of a fully-scripted tool-chain and a collection of libraries which can be used to develop production quality applications comprised of software components running on CPUs communicating with hardware components implemented in FPGA or ASIC.

The following goals are central to this endeavor:

Connect software and hardware by compiling interface declarations.
Enable concurrent access to hardware accelerators from software.
Enable high-bandwidth sharing of system memory with hardware accelerators.
Provide portability across platforms (CPU, OS, bus types, FPGAs).

View Sourcecode on GitHub

Benefits

Embedded System Companies

Do you need to easily/economically need to attach new sensors or peripherials to an embedded platform? Do requirements change frequently, in response to system testing? Is it difficult to coordinate these changes across separately managed H/W and S/W development teams?

Connectal gives a single team the ability to deliver combined HW/SW solutions, offering more timely response to customer demands and getting products out to the market quickly

Server System Companies

Despite having deployed large numbers of commodity servers, do you find them a poor match to common workloads? Not wanting to get locked into a custom server design, don't you wish for a hardware accelerator that you could flexibly alter in response to changing workloads?

Connectal gives your system software infrastructure teams an understandable toolchain for building parts of your applications accellerated with commodity FPGA components. By not being locked into a particular vendor nor component configuration, you can quickly adapt to changing usage requirements.

Business Development

Often business opportunities depend on delivering high functionality into a specific form factor or interfacing with specific external environmental sensors or actuators.

By allowing you to structure small, customer-problem specific teams that can deliver both high feature software and meet physical form factor targets quickly, you can get enhanced profitability by getting to the market more quickly than your competitors.

SW Developers

Have you been frustrated by wanting an interface to a hardware component structured in a way that fits better with its usage by software? Does it seem like simple changes are either not possible or take a long time?

With Connectal, you can do your initial design and debugging, building simple interfaces to hardware components yourself. After the overall design matures, you will have a concrete working example to take into productization, saving a lot of confusion, expense and time.

HW Developers

Since processors have become so inexpensive to incorporate into hardware designs, do you wish that you had a development environment that would allow you to develop the embedded software at the same time, without waiting for a separate software team to deliver? Do you find yourself forced to build hardware logic for complex initialization or control functions because of the difficulty of coordinating these fine grained dependancies across separate development teams?

Connnectal gives you the ability to codevelop the related software components at the same time as you develop the hardware that they control. By having a single framework to build the components and managing all your source in a common source repository, design changes become quicker and more reliable.