[Oberon] Oberon on Zynq

[skulski at pas.rochester.edu]

Dear Felix:

  thank you for the message. The prospect of seeing Oberon on Zynq is very
exciting and potentially very useful. We are looking towards Zynq for
some of our embedded projects, but high complexity of Linux running on
this device is a deterrent. It would certainly be of great value if we
could use the Zynq device with a Oberon derivative.

I am looking forward to seeing the Active Cells in the open source,
accompanied by enough tools to let use it for embedded Zynq programming.
This is a very exciting prospect indeed.

Thank you for the heads up!

Wojtek

> Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2014 11:48:58 +0100
> From: Felix Friedrich <felix.friedrich at inf.ethz.ch>
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Oberon System on the ?
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems <oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch>
> Message-ID: <5458AF1A.4080001 at inf.ethz.ch>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed
>
> Dear Wojtek, all,
>
> yes, I am reading the mailing list and in particular the discussions
> around FPGA / Oberon.
>  From 2009 - 2013 we have worked on a Microsoft funded project called
> "Supercomputer in the Pocket". Initial goal was basically educational:
> develop a programming language / programming model together with a
> suitable component on an FPGA to ease parallel or concurrent computing.
> In the course of the project it shifted towards (medical)
> high-performance applications on FPGAs. The work is ongoing and is in
> the process of getting mature.
>
> And we have reached the goal to run high-performance applications on an
> FPGA. In order to achieve this, our programming model (called "Active
> Cells") foresees on the one hand little general purpose cores (TRMs -
> Tiny Register Machines) and on the other hand specialized computation
> engines.  Most important feature is that we provide access to the FPGA
> from a dialect of Oberon consequently in high-level.
> We have A2 (programmed in Active Oberon) running on the Zynq ARM cores
> interacting with a Active Cells System on Chip on the FPGA fabric. We
> have various student projects on that and other hardware and teach the
> students how to go along this road in our System Construction Course.
> A company has developed two products on the base of this programming
> model and is successfully making business with it. Which does, by the
> way, not imply that the development and toolchain is closed. Everything
> implemented at ETH will be available open source.
>
> We are in the process of writing a good introduction to the programming
> model, the toolchain etc. I will post on this list when and where we
> make it available.
>
> Best regards
> Felix Friedrich