Making FPGAs Accessible to Scientists and Engineers as Domain Expert Software Programmers with LabVIEW

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how LabVIEW's graphical programming environment and techniques can make FPGA development accessible to scientists and engineers without extensive hardware design expertise.

Contribution

It introduces a framework and programming patterns that simplify FPGA programming for domain experts using LabVIEW.

Findings

LabVIEW enables easier FPGA programming for non-hardware experts.

The framework improves accessibility and reduces complexity in FPGA development.

Programming patterns enhance usability for scientists and engineers.

Abstract

In this paper we present a graphical programming framework, LabVIEW, and associated language and libraries, as well as programming techniques and patterns that we have found useful in making FPGAs accessible to scientists and engineers as domain expert software programmers.