MathWorks Automates Vision Systems Design for Implementation on FPGAs and ASICs

MathWorks announces that with the recent availability of Release 2019b of the MATLAB and Simulink product families, Vision HDL Toolbox includes native multipixel streaming support to process high-frame-rate (HFR) and high-resolution videos on FPGAs. Video, image processing and FPGA design engineers can speed the exploration and simulation of behavior and implementation tradeoffs when processing 4k or 8k video and videos with resolutions of 240fps or higher.

Vision HDL Toolbox offers blocks that can process four or eight pixels in parallel, with the underlying hardware implementation automatically updated to support simulation and code generation with the specified parallelism. This capability helps hardware engineers collaborate with image and video processing engineers to explore and simulate vision processing hardware behavior at a high level of abstraction. By adding HDL Coder to this design workflow, engineers can generate synthesizable, optimized target-independent VHDL or Verilog code directly from their verified high-level models.

“Implementing vision processing algorithms on FPGA, ASIC and SoC devices requires clever tradeoffs between throughput and resource usage, and 4k, 8k and high-frame rate video multiplies this challenge,” says Jack Erickson, principal product marketing manager at MathWorks. “Exploring the solution space and simulating at a high level of abstraction helps engineers converge more rapidly on an architecture before committing to Register-Transfer Level (RTL). Vision HDL Toolbox and its native multi-pixel-per-clock processing automatically implement all the details so engineers can focus on developing hardware-ready algorithms that meet their requirements.”

Vision HDL Toolbox provides pixel-streaming algorithms for the design and implementation of vision systems on FPGA, ASIC and SoC devices. It provides a design framework that supports a diverse set of interface types, frame sizes, and frame rates. The video and image processing algorithms in the toolbox model hardware implementations include latency, control signals and line buffers.

The toolbox algorithms are designed to generate readable, synthesizable code in VHDL and Verilog (with HDL Coder). The generated HDL code is FPGA-proven for frame sizes up to 8k resolution and for HFR video.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.