Development of FPGA-based, network-enabled embedded systems in Register\nTransfer Level hardware description languages is tedious. Despite the automation of this\nprocess with numerous EDA tools available, no well-established design patterns exist. Moreover,\nthe entire production cycle requires appropriate theoretical background and hardware\ndesign intuition from the developer which discourages the software community. To improve\nproductivity and minimize time to market when assembling such systems, we propose a new\nhardware/software co-design approach to building reconfigurable hardware web services.\nThe proposed integrated development platform features a programmable FPGA board where\ncomputations of different nature and purpose are logically distributed among a sequential\nsoft-core processor program, a massively parallel accelerator and an independent communication\nmodule that handles remote clients� requests. Our second contribution is a set of\ntools that make the development of the aforementioned services essentially a software design\nundertaking with the extensive use of high-level programming languages. The platform\nhas been tuned to act as a flexible runtime environment for image processing services, thus\nproviding functionality of an intelligent camera. Two example services built from scratch\naccording to the new methodology are discussed. Reduced development time and significant\nperformance gain observed prove validity of the proposed approach and unveil a large\npotential of the assembled prototype.
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