LabVIEW FPGA Idea Exchange

As the compilation goes on of the LabVIEW FPGA code to bitfile, there is an intermediary step when a VHDL file (or maybe Verilog?) is generated. This file would be very beneficial if you want to use another FPGA target, that NI supports. I know that this VHDL file cannot be directly used for non supported FPGA, but it would be a very good starting point for the ones that know VHDL language.

Hi,

I find Conditional Disable Symbols in FPGA code very useful especially in a R&D environment where needs and code change back and forth rapidly. However, I also find it hard to keep track of all these changes. I propose to add support for reading FPGA Conditional Disable Symbols from Host to enable VIs like "Is_FPGA_Function_A_Enabled.vi" that would allow for the Host program to know the state (hardware revision of sorts) of the FPGA bitfile and adapt.

I'll give an example to illustrate this proposal.

Function A is implemented in FPGA bitfile v1. Function B is implemented in Host and is based on multiple calls to Function A. Your boss now wants Function B implemented in FPGA for performance reasons with means to disable the code if required. For this you define a Conditional Disable Symbol in the FPGA project "FPGA_WITH_FUNC_B" and write FPGA code for FPGA bitfile v2. Switching between v1 and v2 is easy enough from the project manager, but for the Host side there's no way of knowing whether Function B is implemented directly in the FPGA or should be "emulated" via Function A as before. If you could do a check like "if FPGA_WITH_FUNC_B == TRUE" you could easily make the Host aware of this.

Regards,

solarsd

We need to have more FPGA Vision example codes. I followed NI introductory articles on image processing using FPGA and they sound great, but was very much disappointed when trying to find usable examples as there are only 5 examples on the IPNet, far fewer than what the intro articles suggest what FPGA can do. 

Currently when you build a VI the bit file path is stored as relative (you can see it in the project XML). This means if you change the project location either:

• Moving machines.
• Checking in and out of source code control on different machines

You have to recompile the FPGA to use VI mode or run interactively. It seems the bitfile could be stored as a relative path like all VIs in the projects.

Cheers,

James

Per NI Applications Engineering, "If you intend to run multiple compiles in parallel on the [Linux] server then yes, you will need the Compile Farm Toolkit running on a Windows machine to handle the parallel workers."  I would like NI to support the FPGA Compile Farm Toolkit on Linux, so I don't need a dedicated Windows server to outsource compiles to workers.