Papers by Manuel Almeida Almeida
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003
Analysis of different combinatorial search algorithms has shown that they have a set of distincti... more Analysis of different combinatorial search algorithms has shown that they have a set of distinctive features in common. The paper suggests a number of reusable blocks that support these features and provide high-level design of combinatorial accelerators.
Euromicro Symposium on Digital System Design, 2003. Proceedings., 2003
This paper suggests tools that provide significant improvements in the design and verification of... more This paper suggests tools that provide significant improvements in the design and verification of FPGAbased digital circuits. These tools include reusable specifications of hardware components (modules) that have been proposed for two types of CAD environments; Xilinx ISE 5.x and Celoxica DK1. The components can be employed to implement both application-specific blocks from the selected area (mainly from the scope of combinatorial computations) and a number of interfaces that are very useful for interaction and data exchange with devices attached to a FPGA, such as LCD and touch panels, bus controllers, etc. The designed modules can be easily integrated into any application-specific digital system and used for visualizing the results, fast data transfer, debugging of internal sub-circuits, etc. They were constructed in such a way that their functionality can be either fixed or modifiable (both statically and dynamically). The latter capability was provided with the aid of re-loadable RAM-based blocks. To illustrate the capabilities of the tools suggested, four design examples are discussed. Additional materials for this paper are available in the form of a number of tutorials and projects for FPGAs that can be accessed through the Internet.
Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Wireless communications and mobile computing, 2007
The paper discusses an FPGA-based prototyping system with both wired and wireless programming and... more The paper discusses an FPGA-based prototyping system with both wired and wireless programming and data exchange facilities. The system can be efficiently used for different types of portable devices. For example, it can supply additional interfaces to mobile computers; can be seen as a hardware accelerator for solving computationally complex problems or serve as a base for portable embedded applications. The system includes an extendable core prototyping board, development tools and supplementary software. The board is designed in such a way that it provides direct support for reconfiguration and self-reconfiguration. It can also be employed for virtual prototyping systems that require more resources that the capacity of the onboard FPGA. The supplementary software includes all necessary drivers and interfaces to interact with the board. The development tools are targeted to design space exploration and they consist of hardware description language libraries, design templates, IP cores, software models and multimedia applications. The latter are mainly used for different types of experiments and for hardware/software partitioning.
Proceedings of the 3rd …, 2006
Electronic devices used in the scope of robotics and embedded systems have to be adapted to numer... more Electronic devices used in the scope of robotics and embedded systems have to be adapted to numerous external events and many of them might be unknown in advance. This application-specific particularity requires environment-specific adaptation and frequent ...
Analysis of different combinatorial search algorithms has shown that they have a set of distincti... more Analysis of different combinatorial search algorithms has shown that they have a set of distinctive features in common. The paper suggests a number of reusable blocks that support these features and provide high-level design of combinatorial accelerators.
Revista Eletrônica de Sistemas de Informação, 2006
O presente artigo apresenta as características e potencialidades de um novo conjunto de ferrament... more O presente artigo apresenta as características e potencialidades de um novo conjunto de ferramentas práticas de baixo custo, para o desenvolvimento de hardware com base em FPGA’s. Muitas placas de prototipagem de hardware existentes no mercado integram uma vasta gama de dispositivos periféricos e interfaces que, podendo nem sequer chegar a ser utilizados, aumentam o seu preço significativamente. Utilizando uma abordagem alternativa, foi desenvolvida uma placa de prototipagem que integra apenas os dispositivos essenciais a uma utilização prática e eficiente da sua funcionalidade e à sua expansibilidade. A arquitectura base implementada inclui uma FPGA, uma CPLD, uma memória flash e um módulo USB. Este último é utilizado para gestão a nível de utilizador e alimentação da placa, a partir de um computador, e também para acoplamento de periféricos. Foi desenvolvido software para gerir a placa, permitindo o envio de bitstreams e a transferência bidireccional de dados de utilizador (com ba...
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Papers by Manuel Almeida Almeida