source: anr/coach_retombees.txt @ 320

Today, FPGAs become important actors in the computational domain that was originally dominated by microprocessors and ASICs. Just like microprocessors, FPGA based systems can be reprogrammed on a per-application basis. For many applications, FPGAs offer significant performance benefits over microprocessors implementation. There is still a performance degradation of one order of magnitude versus an equivalent ASIC implementations, but low cost (500 euros to 10K euros), fast time-to-market and flexibility of FPGAs make them an attractive choice for low-to-medium volume applications. 

Since their introduction in the mid eighties, FPGAs evolved from a simple, low-capacity gate array to devices (Altera STRATIX III, xilinx Virtex V) that provide a mix of coarse-grained data path units, memory blocks, microprocessor cores, on chip A/D conversion, and gate counts by millions. This high logic capacity allows to implement complex systems like multi-processors platform with application dedicated coprocessors.  This market is in significant expansion and is estimated to 914 M$ in 2012.

Nowadays, there are no commercial or academic tools covering the whole design flow from the system level specification to the bitstream generation neither for embedded system design nor for HPC.

The COACH project proposes an open-source framework for mapping multi-tasks software applications on Field Programmable Gate Array circuits (FPGA).  It aims to propose solutions to the societal/economical challenges by providing SMEs novel design capabilities enabling them to increase their design productivity with design exploration and synthesis methods that are placed on top of the state-of-the-art methods.

We believe that the combination of a design environment dedicated to software developpers and FPGA targets, will allow small and even very small companies to propose embedded system and accelerating solutions for standard software applications with attractive and competitive prices.  This new market may explode in the same way as the micro-computer market in the eighties, whose success was due to the low cost of the first micro-processors (compared to main frames) and the advent of high level programming languages which allowed a high number of programmers to launch start-ups in software engineering.

The large number of SMEs that have expressed interest for the COACH project (ten letters of interest collected
in one month) demonstrates that theres is a real need for this type of tools. 

The COACH project can have a strong economical impact.