Case Study: Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) achieves near‑real‑time high-performance video processing and scalable multi‑FPGA prototyping with Synopsys

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität - Customer Case Study

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen‑Nürnberg’s (FAU) Computer Architecture Research Group, working on invasive computing and heterogeneous tiled architectures for high‑performance video processing, needed a way to validate and characterize processor‑array designs in hardware. Their challenges included processing high volumes of 1024×768 video at near real‑time rates, displaying results for qualitative review, making rapid hardware/firmware changes, supporting DVI I/O, and providing external visibility and control from a host workstation—limits that vendor evaluation boards and purely simulated flows could not meet.

FAU adopted the Synopsys FPGA‑Based Prototyping System with multi‑FPGA capacity, UMRBus Interface Kit and AMBA transactors to connect a host workstation for software control and monitoring. The hybrid prototyping flow enabled rapid design iterations, scalable partitioning across multiple FPGAs, and C++/AMBA‑based run‑time control, delivering prototype processor clocks of 55 MHz (≈47M pixels/s) for near real‑time performance versus kHz simulation speeds and a portable, demonstrable platform with improved I/O and debug visibility.

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität

Frank Hannig

Architecture and Compiler Design Group Leader