Programming FPGAs in C

FPGAs are normally programmed in special-purpose programming languages such as VHDL, which unfortunately can be hard to learn. Now, however, it is possible to program hardware in good old-fashioned C! Compared with conventional sequential execution of a program in a microcontroller, the results are considerably faster. We look at how C code can be compiled into hardware, using the Altium Designer development suite as an example.