Silicon Sea
Introduction
Silicon Sea is the brand that comprises software tools for the development and programming of FPGAs.
Traditionally, FPGAs have been programmed using complex electronic design tools with a steep learning curve. These tools offered great control over each of the FPGAs logic gates, thus allowing experienced electronic engineers to obtain optimum circuit designs. As the number of logic gates available in FPGAs increased over time, so did the complexity of the designs that fully exploit them. As the development cost of projects using traditional RTL tools and the latest generation of FPGAs increased, some projects became unfeasible or did not generate the profit to justify the investment.
Silicon Sea tackles the problem of programming FPGAs from a different perspective. Instead of describing the electronic circuit, the engineer defines its behaviour by means of a computer programming language. Silicon Sea automatically generates multiple equivalent electronic circuits, taking into account best practices and selecting the one that with better performance. In most cases this approximation offers a reduction of design costs of up to 90%, leaving them in the range of simple software applications.
Silicon Sea does not require previous knowledge about electronic design. It models FPGAs with concepts and standards widely accepted in the software community. It is a tool created for software engineers with basic computing knowledge.
Silicon Sea can exploit the power of FPGAs to:
- Control real time processes and devices.
- Run complex algorithms in low power consumption environments.
- Paralelization of computing tasks without using expensive computation networks.
Tech Specs:
- Operating Systems: Windows and Linux
- Supported FPGAs: Actel, Altera and Xilinx
- Programming Language for FPGAs: C
