Today, Beetlebox announces the availability of BeetleboxCI in Early Access, the first Continuous Integration (CI) service for FPGA designs. BeetleboxCI is designed to meet the growing need for design productivity by accelerating time-to-market through powerful cloud automation.
FPGA technology is growing in popularity and recent innovations are making them preferable to CPUs and GPUs in high-performance applications. FPGAs can provide ten-fold performance over CPUs and offer high performance per Watt compared to GPUs. However, some developers are still hesitant to use FPGAs due to the larger development times.
BeetleboxCI solves many of the problems encountered in FPGA development that lead to these long development periods. Through adopting CI, developers can improve software quality, reduce validation time, and reduce time spent finding and addressing bugs. Source code is kept in a central repository to which all members of a design team regularly contribute. BeetleboxCI will then automatically process these changes into a single pipeline, providing feedback and valuable data more quickly than through a manual process. Through BeetleboxCI, FPGA developers can deliver novel, innovative designs faster without reducing quality.
“As FPGA applications increase in complexity and challenge CPUs in the high-performance space, it is key for designers to adopt modern development techniques,” said Andrew Swirski, managing director of Beetlebox. “We have seen major advancements when it comes to using software languages and tools, but software development practices, such as Continuous Integration, haven’t caught up yet. We want to change that.”
Modern FPGA design incorporates new, productive development methods, such as high-level synthesis and system-on-chip technology that opens FPGA design to software developers and data scientists. BeetleboxCI allows developers to create highly efficient development pipelines across multi-disciplinary teams, which stretch throughout the technology stack from hardware and firmware to software apps. This development pipeline creates a single source for builds and test data that can easily be monitored by project management. BeetleboxCI leads to more reliable releases.
Adopting BeetleboxCI can also help individual members of a team become more efficient as many of the tasks in FPGA design can be run in parallel. In a computer vision case study, the total build and test time was reduced from one hour and 26 minutes, running on a local machine, to 21 minutes, when utilising parallel tasks on BeetleboxCI.
In addition to this, BeetleboxCI’s cloud-based infrastructure is designed to make automating workflows quick and simple. Other CI solutions used in the FPGA industry rely on clients’ own infrastructure, making them time consuming and costly to set-up and maintain. Scaling these CI systems also requires large investment in additional hardware resources. With BeetleboxCI, all processes are run on the cloud, meaning there is no software set-up, no required infrastructure, and no limits to scalability.
The launch into Early Access will give developers a chance to automate their processes fast and provide feedback to make BeetleboxCI the best possible solution for their needs.
BeetleboxCI is now available with a free trial that provides 10,000 credits, which gives more than five hours of run time. For more information, visit: www.beetlebox.org or email us at contact@beetlebox.org.
Follow Beetlebox on Twitter and LinkedIn.
About Beetlebox Limited
Beetlebox is an Electronic Design Automation company focused on automating the design process of FPGA technology across a vast variety of applications. Beetlebox has developed BeetleboxCI, the first Continuous Integration solution built from the ground up for FPGA design. We provide solutions to our customers to increase their time-to-market, by adopting innovative development tools.
Source: Beetlebox Limited
Category: Product Announcements