Xilinx acquires assets of Falcon Computing Solutions

3rd December 2020

Xilinx

Alex Lynn

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Xilinx has announced it has acquired Falcon Computing Solutions, a privately-held provider of high-level synthesis (HLS) compiler optimisation technology for hardware acceleration of software applications. The acquisition will make adaptive computing more accessible to software developers by enhancing the Xilinx Vitis Unified Software Platform with automated hardware-aware optimisations.

The integration of Falcon Computing’s innovative compiler technology into the Vitis platform will allow software developers to accelerate C++ applications with minimal hardware expertise. Falcon Computing’s source code transformation reduces the need for application developers to adapt their code, or add architecture-specific programming directives, in order to achieve significant hardware acceleration.

“The growing demand for adaptive computing is driving a new era of FPGA adoption in the data center and embedded applications,” said Salil Raje, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “Falcon Computing’s innovative compiler technology and highly specialised compiler team will provide critical expertise that will advance software programmability and help bring the benefits of adaptive computing to more developers.”

“Our compiler technology enables software developers to quickly achieve an order of magnitude acceleration over CPUs with very little knowledge of the FPGA hardware architecture, as our compiler provides a high degree of automation to optimise off-chip data movement, on-chip data reuse, memory partitioning, parallel and pipelined computation acceleration,” said Dr Jason Cong, co-founder and chairman of Falcon Computing. “The single-source Open-MP like programming style is very friendly to a large base of C/C++ software developers, especially those from the high-performance computing and embedded system communities.”

Falcon Computing was co-founded in 2014 by Dr. Jason Cong, the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the Computer Science Department of UCLA, the Director of the Center for Domain Specific Computing, a Fellow of ACM and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. With roots in academia and research, Falcon Computing has been at the forefront of the new wave of FPGA adoption.

Dr Cong also co-founded AutoESL (now Vitis HLS) which Xilinx acquired in 2010 and Neptune Design Automation (now part of Vivado) which Xilinx acquired in 2013. Falcon Computing is headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif. The company serves enterprise customers and academic institutions across the United States and China.

Financial details of Falcon Computing and the terms of the asset purchase transaction are not being disclosed. For