Hardware Acceleration As a Design Tool

When hardware acceleration is turned off, videos, high-definition games, and many other programs slow down your computer as the CPU tries to process everything. By turning it on, you can shift some of this power to specific hardware such as audio and graphics cards, freeing up your processor to handle more tasks.

These devices are better suited to a particular task than the processor of your computer. Hardware accelerators are used to accomplish many tasks, including 3D rendering, decoding video and even regular expression hardware acceleration to stop spam attacks that employ patterns such as ‘ r n’.

Hardware acceleration can be used as a design tool to boost the performance of algorithms that require a lot of algorithm and would otherwise take a general-purpose processor too long to perform. They can be built into an integrated circuit, or external components that communicate with a processor by mapping instructions from the processor to hardware-accelerated functions. They can be granular spread-related indicators in nature and range from a small unit, like a memory block that handles bit blits up to an entire accelerator running a fixed algorithms, such as motion estimation.

Cadence provides a broad set of tools that can be used to aid in the hardware acceleration design processes. These include Stratus high-level synthesizing, Genus Logic Synthesis, Innovus implementation systems, Low power analysis for conformal systems and Joules Power Analysis. These tools allow designers to create cost-effective and highly efficient hardware accelerations that are optimized for the intended applications and markets.