High-level synthesis (HLS) is increasingly popular for the design of high-performance and energy-efficient heterogeneous systems, shortening time-to-market and addressing today’s system complexity. HLS allows designers to work at a higher-level of abstraction by using a software program to specify the hardware functionality. Additionally, HLS is particularly interesting for designing field-programmable gate array circuits (FPGA), where hardware implementations can be easily refined and replaced in the target device. Recent years have seen much activity in this research community, with a plethora of HLS tool offerings, from industry and academia, but none of these solutions are widespread for industrial use.
FPGA development requires certain skills, specific knowledge and specialised hardware. Gathering these are expensive and due to this limitation can only be achieved by a small fraction of software developers, which makes access to FPGAs equally limited. With our solution we aim to give access to those software engineers who lack this specific knowledge.
We have initially recognised the industrial need for HLS for FPGA in 2012 and that is when the first concept of Hastlayer was born. In 2013 we established Lombiq with the purpose to develop the perfect HLS tool (Hastlayer) for industry although the actual development did not start until 2015 as we had to raise capital through other means. We became experts in Orchard web content management system offering development, training and consulting. We have also developed and successfully commercialised our own product, DotNest SaaS for Orchard that is available through Microsoft Azure. Our work has allowed us to grow in size and use the generated revenues to fund the Hastlayer development that has reached a stage where Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure can integrate it into their marketplace.
Hastlayer provides an HLS (Software as a Service) service consisting of multiple tools that allows desktop, web and mobile software developers to increase the performance of their computationally intensive and resource demanding applications by executing critical parts of their software on a specialised hardware architecture remotely or locally (FPGA) without having the in-depth knowledge of such platforms. This solution results in lower development cost when it comes to optimisation, cheaper hardware when it comes to speeding up a slow program but most importantly makes continuous development exceptionally fast.
Before we can turn Hastlayer into a product we carried out a feasibility study in order to define use cases, tackle security issues and develop the most suitable business model to maximize market penetration.
