The initial Ultra-D\u2019s implementation was achieved by a team comprising four core engineers, and three specialists who were brought aboard later on. There was consequently little scope to adopt HLS in a leisurely way<\/p>\n
The business challenges facing SeeCubic\u2019s were also highly relevant to its adoption of HLS, and again arguably more influential than they might have been for larger users. The salesforce needed an FPGA-based IP demonstrator to convince potential clients to incorporate Ultra-D as a block within their own SoCs. So, the demonstrator needed to show the technology working and provide metrics for potential clients (e.g. memory bandwidth requirements and silicon area costs).<\/p>\n
Here the fact that, as engineer Eric Leenman explains, \u201cHLS decouples the design from the technology\u201d was very important.<\/p>\n
That decoupling allowed SeeCubic to develop a C++ \u2018golden reference\u2019 template for its IP that could be fed into an HLS tool (here, Mentor\u2019s Catapult<\/a>) to generate RTL aimed at different process technology libraries. These could range from the Altera FPGA used for the demonstrator to the various processes at major foundries that could ultimately be used for customers\u2019 own silicon.<\/p>\n Ultra-D is an innovative format for glasses-free 3D viewing and rendering. Existing 3D digital content can be converted to the format on-the-fly. Meanwhile, 2D content can undergo stereo conversion to 3D Ultra-D for later viewing.<\/p>\n SeeCubic describes the its processing algorithm like this: \u201cThe light of individual sub-pixels is directed from the screen and projected into space; this generates virtual pixels. Virtual pixels merge in the space and form a complete view for each eye of the viewer. From that point the viewer\u2019s brain takes over processing both views in the same natural way, as it is used to in the real world, creating a natural 3D experience.\u201d<\/p>\n The converted material can be viewed on a standard display once an extra stack of layers of refractive and diffractive optical elements has been bonded to it.<\/p>\n Figure 1. Ultra-D overview (SeeCubic)<\/p><\/div>\n The technology can be used across a range of panels from just a few inches to several feet. As noted earlier, SeeCubic\u2019s commercial objective is to market Ultra-D as an IP block for integration on multifunctional display SoCs.<\/p>\n As 2016 drew to a close, the Ultra-D technology was generating increasing interest. Companies as varied as Orange and Toyota had hosted demonstrations of the company\u2019s initial hardware prototype. The time had come to progress to an IP demonstrator.<\/p>\n HLS rapidly emerged as an attractive design option because it would allow the team to address multiple challenges. As noted earlier, there were numerous commercial considerations. To those they now also needed to add, an ability to perhaps tweak the specification according to a potentially unforeseen customer request. Meanwhile from a technological point of view, the small design team wanted as much of its effort to be ready-for-primetime as possible.<\/p>\n Eric Leenman particularly cites a presentation at DAC 2016 by Nvidia on the use of HLS in a video-heavy implementation \u201cWe knew the guy who was giving the presentation,\u201d he says, \u201cand that he knew what he was talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n The main deliverables SeeCubic aimed to benchmark with HLS included:<\/p>\n To these ends, the company took an evaluation license for the Catapult HLS tool from Mentor, A Siemens Business, in January 2017. By February, the company had familiarized itself sufficiently with Catapult that it felt ready to move forward with a trial design covering one block within its entire IP package.<\/p>\n At that point, SeeCubic felt able to compare a \u2018traditional\u2019 design flow (in which an algorithm design team would pass from a \u2018golden\u2019 C model for implementation in a traditional HDL (e.g., VHDL\/Verilog\/SystemVerilog)) with a new HLS-driven one (where algorithm development and hardware design took place into the same simultaneous environment).<\/p>\nUltra-D<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"HLS](\"https:\/\/www.techdesignforums.com\/practicefiles\/2017\/09\/HLS-SeeCubic-Fig1-1.png\")
<\/a>Choosing HLS<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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