High-Level Synthesis Developments in the Context of European Space Technology Research (Invited Talk)

European efforts to boost competitiveness in the space services sector promote the research and development of advanced software and hardware solutions. The EU-funded HERMES project contributes to the effort by qualifying radiation-hardened, high-performance programmable microprocessors and developing a software ecosystem that facilitates the deployment of complex applications on such platforms. The main objectives of the project include reaching a technology readiness level of 6 (i.e., validated and demonstrated in relevant environment) for the rad-hard NG-ULTRA FPGA with its ceramic hermetic package CGA 1752, developed within projects of the European Space Agency, French National Centre for Space Studies and the European Union. An equally important share of the project is dedicated to the development and validation of tools that support multicore software programming and FPGA acceleration. The HERMES project selected the Bambu High-Level Synthesis tool to integrate capabilities to translate C/C++ code into Verilog/VHDL in its development ecosystem. In HERMES, Bambu has been and will be extended to support new FPGA targets, architectural models, model-based design, and input applications. The increased performance offered by FPGAs is thus made available also to software developers who do not have hardware design expertise.