Tokyo, Japan – May 18, 2011 – Impulse Accelerated Technologies today announced that Hagiwara Electric of Tokyo, Japan, has introduced a new service to develop customized FPGA-based image processing libraries and solutions, using the Impulse CoDeveloper high-level synthesis tools.
As originally reported in the Japanese publication, Tech-On, at the 14th annual Embedded Systems Expo (ESEC) held at Tokyo May 9-11, Hagiwara Electric has introduced its new service to enable fast development of FPGA board level solutions for image processing. Hagiwara is using the Impulse C-to-FPGA synthesis tools in combination with proprietary image processing libraries. This approach allows the prototype board-level solutions be developed and deployed in a just a few days. This rapid development is possible because of Hagiwara’s model library, written in the C language, providing a variety of configurable image processing functions.
The result of combining Impulse C-to-FPGA compilation with Hagiwara libraries is faster, more efficient C code, ready for input to the Impulse CoDeveloper high-level synthesis tool. According to one Hagiwara Electric staff member at ESEC, “For prototyping applications, you can start running the desired image processing in just a few days.”
This combined C-to-FPGA and library design flow was originally developed at Hagiwara for internal use, but Hagiwara Electric will now start offering the C-language model library through cooperation with Interlink, Inc. of Yokohama, Japan, an Impulse reseller. The Hagiwara image processing library contains more than 100 kinds of filters and other components, written in the C language. Functions in the library include expansion / contraction, movement, rotation, cropping, blurring, edge detection, negative and positive transformation. These functions can be combined to create a wide variety of applications.
“Impulse C has been used internationally for image processing projects including long distance facial recognition, passenger counting, and medical imaging,” said David Buechner, Impulse Vice President of Business Development. “We have numerous partners and customers such as Hagiwara who have extended the Impulse tools through the addition of customized libraries and platform-specific extensions. We believe that extending Impulse C in this way is a great way to reduce time and risk for companies moving software applications to FPGAs.”
About Hagiwara Electric
Hagiwara Electric is a Japan-based company supplying electronic components and custom design services, including integrated circuits, microprocessors and hybrid ICs. Hagiwara also manufactures and sells factory automation computers and peripheral equipment, encoders, position control units, sequence controllers and power supply devices, and image processing components.
About Impulse Accelerated Technologies
Founded in 2002, Impulse C-to-FPGA tools enable developers to quickly offload processing logic to FPGAs. Impulse also provides training and custom solutions for FPGA-based embedded and high performance computing. Impulse C has been used to design vision systems, financial feed handlers, bioinformatics accelerators and many other applications. Impulse products are used by most federal agencies, most major car manufacturers, financial institutions, Japanese image processing firms, most top government defense contractors, and hundreds of R&D labs worldwide. www.ImpulseAccelerated.com
