Silicon Graphics Teams With Celoxica to Accelerate High-Performance Computing Applications; FPGA-based Acceleration Solution Combines Celoxica C-based Design Tools With SGI's Reconfigurable Computing Technology.

OXFORDSHIRE, England -- Celoxica, Ltd. today announced support for Silicon Graphics, Inc.'s (SGI) Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing (RASC) technology in the Celoxica DK Design Suite of tools for C-based design and synthesis. Celoxica and SGI have teamed to deliver libraries and tools defining a software programming environment for algorithm acceleration using field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs. SGI intends to include evaluation copies of Celoxica's design software as part of its RASC development kit shipping this month.

"For FPGA-based acceleration in high-performance computing applications, having a software-based programming environment is extremely important," said Steve Miller, chief engineer, system architecture, at SGI. "The Celoxica tools give RASC customers an easy-to-use programming environment for accelerating their C software algorithms using the parallel processing capabilities of FPGA without going through hardware description languages."

RASC is the term coined by SGI in reference to high-performance computing systems which use FPGA technology in a co-processor model. Reconfigurable chips can be programmed by a customer to optimize their specific tasks in co-processing systems that can offer significant -- potentially orders of magnitude -- performance improvements at lower power and heat than conventional microprocessors alone. Applications that can benefit from this approach include image recognition, decryption, gene comparison, video format translation, and data compression to name a few.

Previous FPGA-based acceleration systems have been limited by the traditional chip design process centered on hardware description languages (HDL). HDL use is both foreign and difficult for most end-user programmers and is too slow for software-oriented algorithm development.

To solve this problem, Celoxica provides a mature and proven C-based design and synthesis environment to accelerate software algorithms on RASC systems. The DK Design Suite of tools delivers a programming path directly to RASC systems from algorithm to system implementation, including software-based design entry, cycle-accurate simulation, C-based synthesis and seamless integration with FPGA vendor place and route tools. Algorithm development using Celoxica tools is typically 60% faster and produces FPGA results that rival HDL flows.

"We are very pleased that SGI chose to include Celoxica tools as one of the C-programming environments in its RASC development kit," said Phil Bishop president and CEO of Celoxica. "This shows the potential of reconfigurable computing and value of C-based design and synthesis in opening access to these systems for users and for new applications. It is truly exciting to be able to offer so much potential for so many markets."

About Celoxica

An innovator in Electronic System Level (ESL) design, Celoxica is turning software into silicon by supplying the design tools, boards, IP and services that enable the next generation of advanced electronic product design. Celoxica technology raises design abstraction to the algorithm level, accelerating productivity and lowering risk and costs by generating semiconductor hardware directly from C-based software descriptions. Adding to a growing installed base, Celoxica provides the world's most widely used C-based behavioral design and synthesis solutions to companies developing semiconductor products in markets such as consumer electronics, defense and aerospace, automotive, industrial and security. For more information, visit: www.celoxica.com.

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