source: anr/section-2.1.tex @ 153

\begin{table}\leavevmode\center
\begin{small}\begin{tabular}{|l|l|l|l|}\hline
Segment                 & 2010   & 2011    & 2012 \\\hline\hline
Communications          & 1,867  & 1,946   & 2,096 \\
High end                & 467    & 511     & 550 \\\hline
Consumer                & 550    & 592     & 672 \\
High end                & 53     & 62      & 75 \\\hline
Automotive              & 243    & 286     & 358 \\
High end                & -      & -       & - \\\hline
Industrial              & 1,102  & 1,228   & 1,406 \\
High end                & 177    & 188     & 207 \\\hline
Military/Aereo          & 566    & 636     & 717 \\
High end                & 56     & 65      & 82 \\\hline\hline
Total FPGA/PLD          & 4,659  & 5,015   & 5,583 \\
Total High-End  FPGA    & 753    & 826     & 914 \\\hline
\end{tabular}\end{small}
\caption{\label{fpga_market} Gartner estimation of worldwide FPGA/PLD consumption (Millions \$)}
\end{table}
%
Microelectronic components allow the integration of complicated functions into products, increases
commercial attractivity of these products and improves their competitivity.
Multimedia and tele-communication sectors have taken advantage from microelectronics facilities
thanks to the developpment of design methodologies and tools for embedded systems.
Unfortunately, the Non Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs involded in designing
and manufacturing ASICs is very high.
An IC foundry costs several billions of euros and the fabrication of a specific circuit
costs several millions. For example a conservative estimate for a 65nm ASIC project is 10
million USD.
Consequently, it is generally unfeasible to design and fabricate ASICs for low and medium
volume markets.
\parlf
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. 
Table~\ref{fpga_market} shows the estimation of FPGA worldwide market in the next years in
various application domains. The ``high end'' lines concern only FPGA with high logic
capacity for complex system implementations.
This market is in significant expansion and is estimated to 914\,M\$ in 2012.
The HPC market size is estimated today by FPGA providers at 214\,M\$. 
Using FPGA limits the NRE costs to the design cost.
This boosts the developpment of automatic design tools and methodologies.
%
%Today, several companies (atipa, blue-arc, Bull, Chelsio, Convey, CRAY, DataDirect, DELL, hp, 
%Wild Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Myricom, NEC, nvidia etc) are making systems where demand 
%for very high performance (HPC) primes over other requirements. They tend to use the highest 
%performing devices like Multi-core CPUs, GPUs, large FPGAs, custom ICs and the most innovative 
%architectures and algorithms. These companies show up in different "traditional" applications and market 
%segments like computing clusters (ad-hoc), servers and storage, networking and Telecom, ASIC 
%emulation and prototyping, military/aereo etc. The HPC market size is estimated today by FPGA providers 
%at 214\,M\$. 
%%%
\parlf
This market is dominated by Multi-core CPUs and GPUs based solutions and the expansion
of FPGA-based solutions is limited by the lack of design flow automation.
Nowadays, there are neither commercial nor academic tools covering the whole design process
from the system level specification to the bit stream generation.
\\
% IA to Alain: J'ai remis (et ameliore un peu) ca car sinon le Consequently 20 lignes
%              au dessous n'a pas de sens.
% Deplus dans les demandes ANR de la section, il est demande: analyse de la concurrence
For instance, with SOPC Builder~\cite{spoc-builder} from \altera, designers can select and
parameterize components from an extensive drop-down list of IP cores (I/O core, DSP,
processor,  bus core, ...) as well as incorporate their own IP.
Designers can then generate a synthesized netlist, simulation test bench and custom
software library that reflect the hardware configuration.
%% Steven disagree : the C2H compiler bundled with SOPCBuilder does a pretty good job at this.
%% IA: ces lignes ont ete verifiees et corrigée pa \altera. De plus C2H est plutot limite.
Nevertheless, SOPC Builder does not provide any facilities to synthesize coprocessors and to
simulate the platform at a high design level (systemC). 
In addition, SOPC Builder is proprietary and only works together with \altera's Quartus compilation
tool to implement designs on \altera devices (Stratix, Arria, Cyclone).
\\
For instance, PICO~\cite{pico} and CATAPULT-C~\cite{catapult-c} allow to synthesize
coprocessors from a C++ description.
Nevertheless, they can only deal with data dominated applications and they do not handle
the platform level.
\\
Similarly, the System Generator for DSP~\cite{system-generateur-for-dsp} is a plug-in to
Simulink that enables designers to develop high-performance DSP systems for \xilinx FPGAs.
Designers can design and simulate a system using MATLAB and Simulink. The tool will then
automatically generate synthesizable Hardware Description Language (HDL) code mapped to
\xilinx pre-optimized macro-cells.
However, this tool targets only DSP based algorithms.
\\
Consequently, a designer developping an embedded system needs to master four different
design environments:
\begin{enumerate}
  \item a virtual prototyping environment such as SoCLib for system level exploration,
  \item an architecture compiler (such as SOPC Builder from \altera, or System generator
  from \xilinx) to define the hardware architecture,
  \item one or several HLS tools (such as PICO~\cite{pico} or CATAPULT-C~\cite{catapult-c}) for 
        coprocessor synthesis,
  \item and finally backend synthesis tools (such as Quartus or Synopsys) for the bit-stream generation.
\end{enumerate}
Furthermore, mixing these tools requires an important interfacing effort and this makes
the design process very complex and achievable only by designers skilled in many domains.
\begin{center}\begin{minipage}{.8\linewidth}\textit{
The aim of the COACH project is to integrate all these design steps into a single design framework.
and to allow \textbf{pure software} developpers to develop embedded systems.
}\end{minipage}\end{center}
\parlf
We believe that the combination of a design environment dedicated to software developpers
and the FPGA target,
allows small and even very small companies to propose embedded system and accelerating solutions 
for standard software applications with acceptable 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.